Consuming the creative city: an urban political ecology of gastrodevelopment

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 dissertation, I develop an urban political ecology of gastrodevelopment based on fieldwork in Tucson, Arizona. Drawing together concepts of metabolism and racializing assemblage, I offer an account of how gastrodevelopment mobilizes symbolic and material resources to reshape the city’s foodscape and Tucson’s urban landscape more broadly. Through a case study of Tucson’s UNESCO City of Gastronomy designation, I demonstrate how gastrodevelopment produces and relies upon a circuit of value production, one that enrolls environmental imaginaries, meanings of place, circuits of capital, and processes of urban transformation in the name of “creative” and “sustainable” development. I show how this circuit of value production is racialized, in that it relies upon and reproduces forms of cultural appropriation, gentrification, and racialized dispossession that produce Tucson’s food heritage as a White cultural and economic possession. In closing, I draw out key historical resonances and the political-economic momentums that will shape Tucson as it continues to be transformed into a “Creative City of Gastronomy.”