Agroecology to fight food poverty in Madrid’s deprived neighbourhoods

Abstract

The agroecological movement is gaining presence in urban spaces, transcending the rural areas where it originated and revealing the need for an alliance between both worlds. As the social justice dimension is at the core of agroecology, one would expect that designing urban food systems with an agroecological approach would prioritize deprived neighbourhoods. However, this is not happening. To overcome it and address food poverty, we explore spatial design principles inspired by agroecology, to transform production and consumption along the urban-rural transect. We developed a methodology and applied it to a vulnerable neighbourhood (Bellas Vistas in Madrid, Spain), to outline a network of productive spaces and collective facilities for an agroecological transition that overcomes the middle-class bias commonly observed in Alternative Food Networks. It defines mechanisms to connect local needs with available resources, considering self-supporting communities, empty plots and underused spaces and buildings, as well as institutional policies and plans. This way, the traditional assistance approach can be replaced by a structural solution that disrupts dominant relationships bringing food sovereignty a step closer.