The health equity dimensions of urban food systems

There is increasing recognition that the nutrition transition sweeping the world’s cities is multifaceted. Urban food and nutrition systems are beginning to share similar features, including an increase in dietary diversity, a convergence toward “Western-style” diets rich in fat and refined carbohydrate and within-country bifurcation of food supplies and dietary conventions. Unequal access to the available dietary diversity, calories, and gastronomically satisfying eating experience leads to nutritional inequalities and diet-related health inequities in rich and poor cities alike. Understanding the determinants of inequalities in food security and nutritional quality is a precondition for developing preventive policy responses. Finding common solutions to under- and overnutrition is required, the first step of which is poverty eradication through creating livelihood strategies. In many cities, thousands of positions of paid employment could be created through the establishment of sustainable and self-sufficient local food systems, including urban agriculture and food processing initiatives, food distribution centers, healthy food market services, and urban planning that provides for multiple modes of transport to food outlets. Greater engagement with the food supply may dispel many of the food anxieties affluent consumers are experiencing.

The rise and fall of urban squatter settlements in Santiago de Chile

The thesis examines the forces at work that resulted in the proliferation in the 1950s-60s, and then the subsequent decline, in the number of urban squatter settelements in Santiago, Chile. A feature of the work is the fieldwork investigation on the material conditions within the squatter settlements households.

Middle-class school choice in urban spaces: the economics of public schooling and globalized education reform

Middle-class School Choice in Urban Spaces examines government-funded public schools from a range of perspectives and scholarship in order to examine the historical, political and economic conditions of public schooling within a globalized, post-welfare context. In this book, Rowe argues that post-welfare policy conditions are detrimental to government-funded public schools, as they engender consistent pressure in rearticulating the public school in alignment with the market, produce tensions in serving the more historical conceptualizations of public schooling, and are preoccupied by contemporary profit-driven concerns.Chapters focus on public schooling from different global perspectives, with examples from Chile and the US, to examine how various social movements encapsulate ideologies around public schooling. Rowe also draws upon a rich, five-year ethnographic study of campaigns lobbying the Victorian State Government in Australia for a brand-new, local-specific public school. Critical attention is paid to the public school as a means to achieve empowerment and overcome discrimination, and both a local and global lens are used to identify how parents choose the public school, the values they attach to it, and the strategies they use to obtain it. Also considered, however, are how quality gaps, distances and differences between public schools threaten to undermine the democracy of education as a means for individuals to be socially mobile and escape poverty.This book makes an important contribution to our understanding of global social movements and activism around public education. As such, it will be of key interest to researchers, academics and postgraduate students in the field of education, specifically those working on school choice, class and identity, as well as educational geography.