The food-gender-cities nexus: a research agenda

Social sciences are paying increasing attention to the questions of gender equality and food systems. Both topics are recognized to have a strong urban dimension. However, urban sociology has not yet attempted to create a theory on how food, gender, and cities interact with each other. Rather, recent literature is quite rich in studies investigating either the relationship between food and cities, gender and food, or gender and cities. This paper connects the most relevant studies on these relationships with the aim of structuring a research agenda on the threefold intersection that literature already hints at, albeit implicitly, in support of the argument that interdisciplinary research focusing specifically on the food-gender-cities nexus is relevant and might lead to useful insights on how gender roles in food-related duties shape daily lives, on how social formations and food practices shape the urban space and, in turn, how the urban space impacts on social roles and practices, and on the potential of the urban scale for integrated policy intervention on food and gender matters.