LOGIC

The Cities

Mossel Bay
Bengaluru
Dzivareasekwa Ext.
Tamale
Colombo

The LOGIC project focused on five cities that are all undergoing significant changes to their demographics and their diets. More people are moving to cities in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa and there is a concerted drive to invest in urban infrastructure. However, this investment is not translating into stability and food security for marginalised populations living in informal settlements, or even in the state-developed resettlement areas. Find out more about the work in each of the study cities.

68% of the Africans experiencing food insecurity live in urban and periurban areas. We must see the connections between cities and their food systems.

Mossel Bay, a small coastal town, has experienced several waves of demographic, socio-cultural and political transformations. This is closely tied to changes in the structure of its economy. which was previously based on agriculture and fishing, and now has become more reliant on commercial services, with the informal economy becoming increasingly significant.

A large, and increasing, proportion of Mossel Bay residents live in informal settlements dotted around the town.

The LOGIC team have been particularly interested in the social and political processes associated with housing, specifically state-led upgrades from informal dwellings to more formal housing. Infrastructure and the grid access are key limitations.

Access to more formal housing offer the potential for access to improved infrastructure, but that is yet to be reality.

Currently infrastructure in informal areas is severely limited. People manage to eat and feed their households by relying on social connections and multiple material ways of accessing power and infrastructure, for example, using a paraffin stove due to electricity instability. Currently infrastructure determines what food can be accessed, impacting nutritional choices. City leadership need to understand the multiple intersecting urban systems.

In Bangalore, we studied the connected between food and infrastructure at multiple scales – including household, neighbourhood and city.

At the neighbourhood and city scales, we interviewed residents, food business operators, vendors, government officials, politicians, CSOs, NGOs and social groups (religious, youth, Dalit, women) to explore their contributions and conflicts.

The household surveys trained women from the neighbourhood as enumerators and included self- journaling by women being surveyed. Our research found that infrastructure is both absent and frequently disrupted, across scales, which affects daily food and livelihood practices.

Across scales, people are stacking multiple infrastructures and procure food in multiple ways. Infrastructural absence and disruptions place significant time and cost burdens on households and food-businesses. It also puts an unequal burden on women, including time and cost trade- off decisions that they often take on behalf of households and businesses. Practices of coping involve relying on extensive social, political and financial networks and resources.

Women contribute significantly within these networks. The study identified recommendations to decentralise municipal budgetary practices, involve local social groups, and create pathways of decision-making with residents and businesses on these issues to improve existing conditions.

Almost everyone in Dzivareasekwa Extension has been affected by poor infrastructure in one way or another with bad roads, regular power cuts, irregular reticulated water supplies, and poorly developed food markets.

The project work focused on understanding how planning laws, governance, and available infrastructure affect food access, and food and nutrition choices in off-grid settlements. Our work has also examined professionals in the planning profession and whether they take responsibility for infrastructure, including links to food systems planning.

While urban planning is well-established and very powerful in Zimbabwe, our research showed that planners are blind to the links between infrastructure and food systems. Planners were willing to admit to infrastructure gaps and the broad impact on daily life, but they do not see the impacts on food and don’t consider it to be their business. Therefore, we have identified an opportunity to work with planners to address this important link.

The work in Tamale took place in ten communities in and around the city which share a common feature of deprivation of one infrastructure or another.

For instance, some of the most waterstarved communities are in the north and south of Tamale. On the other hand, the centrally-located communities experience are lacking multiple infrastructures because the city’s historical development was bypassed by colonial planning and infrastructure provision.

The project focused on access to water, energy (electricity), sanitation and transportation and how the intersections of these influence the character of the city’s food system, as well as households’ food security and nutritional outcomes.

To gauge the citizens’ lived experiences we used different approaches including monitoring traditional and social media.

On community radio, we traced daily phone-in conversations, debates and lamentations about infrastructure and infrastructure-related problems and ho these are articulated on social media. In Tamale, the media space is an important platform for residents to get their voices heard, and for leaders to be held accountable. These exchanges sometimes lead to solutions being found for some of the pressing problems in the city.

Colombo Urban Lab’s approach to this research project has been informed by advocacy approaches that seek to turn research findings into actionable evidence that can be used to create change.

The team employed an ethnographic approach – spending a considerable amount of time with communities along with multiple follow-up interviews to get a deep understanding of how access to infrastructure determined access to food.

These findings from the household interviews were then used to develop policy recommendations that reflected the needs of the communities following the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing economic crisis. These policy recommendations were subsequently presented back to the communities for feedback and finalised together.

These recommendations have informed advocacy in different ways, from drafting comments for public consultations on utility tariff raises, to working with the municipal council to improve nutrition interventions, to informing debt justice and social security advocacy work in Sri Lanka.

In Growing Hope settlement, 560 households share 1 tap, and there is one toilet per 40 households.

Mossel Bay,
South Africa

Households spend more than 40% of their income on food and more than 2 hours a day on infrastructure access.

Bengaluru,
India

Food prices in DZ are approximately 30% higher than in most parts of Harare.

DZ,
Zimbabwe

65% of householdsstudied rely heavily on fuelwood and charcoal for food preparation because electricity is too expensive.

Tamale,
Ghana

Electricity tariffs increased by 75% in August 2022 and by 66% in February 2023.

Colombo,
Sri Lanka

Key Messages

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1

Food security and nutrition are dependent on public services and infrastructure. The twin food and fuel crisis that has affected many of the world’s poor demonstrate the link between energy costs and infrastructure and people’s ability to spend time cooking.

2

The Living Off-Grid and Infrastructure Collaboration has studied the relationship between infrastructure, food security and nutrition across five cities in South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa. We found many examples of food’s fundamental dependency on infrastructure, including water, sanitation, electricity, transport and markets.

3

Most families are not simply ‘on-grid’ or ‘off-grid’ but use a variety of different infrastructural forms – public-private, connected to the grid or independent of it. Understanding how people trade up and down in terms of infrastructural provision is critical to understanding how this affects their food and nutrition security.

4

For marginalised people, gaps in public provision, high costs of provision, poor repair and maintenance add significant time and cost burdens. These affect both food choice and affect wider family welfare.

5

Poor infrastructure adds significantly to the time burden of women, who alongside cooking and other unpaid care tasks, also carry out tasks of infrastructure maintenance, repair and filling other gaps in provision.

6

Infrastructure systems are not just pipes and wires – people (playing these repair and maintenance roles, or acting as a gatekeeper for access) play a critical role in infrastructure systems; as do ideas or ideologies of who gets which service, provided by whom, who pays.

7

The ability of individuals, households and communities to control their own access to infrastructures – their agency – and the forms and extent of infrastructures that are available to them at a certain moment are dictated by power structures and social and political relations that are context specific. Together these are the factors that condition or shape the possibilities for individuals and households.

8

Urban policy has tended to neglect food policy and food policy has tended to neglect urban areas, even thought the majority of the world’s food insecure live in urban areas. This leads to poor policy decisions – such as relocating markets, cracking down on street traders and raising water and electricity prices without thinking of the impacts on food and nutrition.

9

Bringing together thinking on urban policy, food policy and infrastructure is long overdue.

Food and Infrastructure Justice

Stories

Naleli

Sadiya

Mafuleni

Azima

Raveen

The Cities

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