Putting food access in its topological place: thinking in terms of relational becomings when mapping space
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Putting food access in its topological place: thinking in terms of relational becomings when mapping space Michael Carolan1 Accepted: 29 August 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract This paper adopts a relational, also known as a topological, approach to food accessibility—the idea that food spaces are best understood as relational becomings rather than as voids filled exclusively with mass (immutable materiality) and address (geospatial coordinates). It is animated by an experimental spirit, in terms of the methods employed, the data collected, and by how those data are brought together, which together better enriches inductive theorizing. The project looks at the daily macro-mobilities—trips from one GPS coordinate to another—of 70 Coloradoans, triangulated with qualitative semi-structured interview data. Data collection occurred over three phases: baseline interviews, which lasted approximately 45 min; 30-day study period, which involved using a GPS tracking app. on their mobile phones; and follow-up interviews that lasted roughly two hours. The paper, through inductive theorizing and methodological experimentation, contributes to the critical food mapping scholarship in three ways: first, by looking at rural and urban food environments and livelihoods (as opposed to focusing exclusively on the latter); second, by focusing on mobilities as opposed to fixities (an example of the former: mapping projects that reduce food access to Euclidean coordinates); and, lastly, by its conceptual innovations attributed to phenomena such as life course and geographies of care. Keywords Food access · Food mapping · Critical cartography and counter-mapping · Mobilities · Care · Ethical consumption · Topological Abbreviations GIS Geographical information system GPS Global Positioning System
Introduction The growing use of geographic information systems (GIS)–based mapping software and techniques has disrupted how scholars, practitioners, activists, and policymakers understand, visualize, and evaluate food environments (e.g., Li and Kim 2018; Shannon and Christian 2017; Sweeney et al. 2016; Widener et al. 2018). At the same time, principles linked to critical cartography and counter‑mapping are being applied to help expose ideologies and philosophical and empirical blind spots embedded in maps and their social effects, which has led to the creation of alternative * Michael Carolan [email protected] 1
Colorado State University, B241 Clark, Fort Collins, CO 80524, USA
maps (e.g., De Master and Daniels 2019; Elwood 2006; Heesen et al. 2014). When mapping phenomena related to food access, for instance, these principles have helped situate overdetermined indicators such as proximity to supermarkets and transportation access, resulting in representations that look little like what were produced prior to the interrogation of those assumptions (De Master and Daniels 2019; Widener 2018). Drawing inspiration from the topological turn in spatial theory, this paper employs what has been called a “relational approach
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