Consuming the creative city: gastrodevelopment in a UNESCO creative city of gastronomy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Scholars have recently coined the term “gastrodevelopment” to refer to the increasingly visible relationships between food, food culture, and processes of urban development. As a paradigm, gastrodevelopment is premised on the leveraging of food culture as a resource and strategy of economic development. In this article, drawing on a case study of Tucson, Arizona – the United States’ first UNESCO City of Gastronomy – we use the lens of gastrodevelopment to examine how food culture is transformed into a form of symbolic capital that animates a broader project of urban development. Drawing on the work of Bourdieu, we trace how everyday food heritage, traditions, and practices are transformed into gastronomic capital in an effort to attract tourists, new residents, and investment. We show how this transformation encodes differentials of value that are racialized and racializing and risk contributing to Tucson’s geographies of uneven development. We then turn to community visions of food-based development to imagine alternative trajectories for the Creative City of Gastronomy designation and gastrodevelopment more broadly.