Abstract
Food-oriented markets, such as food innovation districts (FIDs), have been touted as potential methods to address complex societal issues involving the environment, poverty, and health. On this front the Grand Rapids Downtown Market (DTM) was created in 2013, envisioned as a vibrant public space for local food, entrepreneurship, community health, and jobs. An innovative, collective response to the interconnected and urgent problems of poverty, access, health, diet, and environment, the DTM can serve as a case study through which the value and necessity of a wicked problems framework become apparent. Wicked problems literature demonstrates that collaborative and iterative processes are essential to effective and inclusive transformational change of food systems, while also emphasizing that there can be no final, ideal solution. On the other hand, as an FID intentionally located in a low-income neighborhood, the DTM has been subject to criticism about top-down, expensive, and exclusionary practices aimed at gentrification. In the end, this analysis suggests that while FIDs can address local problems resulting from dominant food systems and practices, they can also function as a gentrifying force. Efforts more directly aimed at bottom-up, participatory engagement are essential to making collectively systemic, equitable changes in current food systems and practices. Emphasizing the need for bridge institutions, we argue that it is essential to value actively a wider array of knowledge cultures.
Highlights
Introduction and PurposePlace-based institutions designed to encourage the production, aggregation, and sale of local foods have become increasingly popular as a means of addressing the widespread and interconnected problems of poverty, health, diet, and environment
As a food innovation district intentionally located in a low-income neighborhood, the Downtown Market (DTM) has been subject to criticism about top-down, expensive, and exclusionary practices that tend to gentrify the neighborhood
The wicked problems (WP) framework is valuable since it can broaden the scope of new initiatives that might otherwise become a force for gentrification
Summary
Comments were recorded through written documentation by L. Growing, processing, transporting, and selling food involves heavily complex, deeply intertwined systems and networks, so much so that effecting change in one arena tends to tug on innumerable strands connected to many other issues, shifting and shuffling the situation for many others.4 Nelson and Stroink (2014) describe issues of food production, access, and transport, as well as consumer affordability and producer incomes, as complex adaptive systems that overlap⎯and interact⎯ with other systems (economic, political, health, etc.) This means that effective and equitable change requires communication across many perspectives as well as the integration of a wide array of information with the range of values involved. The following sections highlight how the DTM is a response to the various dimensions of wickedness this area of Grand Rapids is facing, and how it aligns with and deviates from recommendations given in the literature
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