IN-PERSON: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

Food insecurity has been geographically imagined as a food desert, swamp, and mirage in Winnipeg, Manitoba, which is home to the largest urban population of Indigenous people in Canada. In this research I interrogate how metrics of food insecurity rely on indexes of deprivation, of which indigeneity is deemed an indicator of social deprivation. I engage the fields of critical Indigenous studies, critical whiteness studies, and STS to argue that social deprivation indexes produce and surveil ‘unlivable’ geographic food zones according to metrics of whiteness. In this research I make three central arguments through the empirical context of food insecurity interventions for Indigenous people in Winnipeg: 1) accounting for food insecurity through social deprivation indexes produces food insecurity because it does not accurately depict sources of food outside of what has been deemed appropriate (see: ‘healthy’) through logics of whiteness; 2) solely imagining food insecurity through logics of social deprivation results in interventions of whiteness, which overdetermines how inner-city urban space is designed and surveilled (e.g., epicurean grocery stores, rezoning neighbourhoods into ‘healthy zones,’ and the policing of private-public space due to perceptions of criminality and food theft); 3) food is an inherent aspect of livability, and if we are to imagine more livable cities, we must be cognizant of what livable means, by whose measurement, and for who cities are made to be more livable – in Winnipeg, this process has been driven by whiteness to the detriment of Indigenous people in need of a city that supports food security.