Introduction

In Chapter 1, we described the problem with regulatory systems that self-referentially exclude ‘ordinary’ citizens from processes of decisionmaking. We suggested that regulatory systems needed to find ways to bring in ‘experts-by-experience’ to work alongside technocratic expertise. To produce regulatory systems that are human-centred, we need to find new ways of incorporating the expertise of citizens who experience being regulated on a daily basis, that is, we must work towards the co-design of such systems.

In this chapter, we discuss our experiments in shifting understandings of expertise and in co-producing research that formed the basis of the Productive Margins programme. Those experiments were structured as the Productive Communities Research Forum, a series of gatherings that included all active co-researchers and occurred every three to six months over the lifetime of the Productive Margins programme. Before we discuss this experimental method, we need to ask: who is the ‘we’ in this chapter? Co-production as a specific set of approaches to collaborative research involves diverse voices. In this chapter, we bring together the Productive Margins principal investigator, community lead, arts and humanities lead, and one of the co-investigators who worked as a link between two projects and the core management group. We have different research interests, forms of expertise, values and standpoints on collaborative working in communities.

Introduction

This chapter focuses on the forms of regulation that shape food habits in ways that we are often unaware of. Invisible rules comprise the forms of regulation that influence food production and consumption at levels that we may be unable to control, such as globalising economic processes, labour processes, dynamics of supply and demand, advertising, and marketing. However, they also comprise the ‘cultural’ rules that – often in implicit ways – dictate who can use which spaces, how it is appropriate to shop or cook, and who may associate with whom. The invisibility of both sets of rules within urban spaces lead many people to answer, in the first instance, that they are the ones who get to decide what is in their fridge. However, through collective reflection, we unearthed the ways in which: labelling misleads us; work and life rhythms combine with street design to influence where we shop; and advertising affects what our children want us to buy. Consequently, the agenda to transform the invisible rules that shape urban food spaces is strongly grounded in the need to render these rules more visible as part of a ‘re-regulation’ (as opposed to a deregulation) of the forces that overdetermine and enclose our food habits, driven by the experience of people whose concerns have been marginalised.

Here, we present some of the results of our co-produced research project that explored how people experience the regulation of food habits in their communities. We draw on multiple sources produced through the project (audio recordings, visual mapping, photography, workshop notes, focus groups and interviews with participants) to explore three key ideas. We begin by exploring the notion of food justice, which seeks to embed discussion of food regulation in attention to the spatial dimensions of food access. Here, we point to the ways in which the project sought to make visible invisible rules and to develop processes of ‘commoning’ in order to address the spatial inequalities of urban food spaces. In the second section, we challenge notions of ‘cheapness’ and instead present ideas of food affordability, following Michael Carolan's (2013) argument that cheap food is part of the problem of unequal food access.

IN BOTH Warsaw and Budapest, fragments of the wartime ghetto walls survive in the heart of the contemporary city. In Warsaw, the best-preserved sections are reached through the courtyard of the apartment block at 62 Złota Street where the red bricks of the wall contrast strikingly with the ubiquitous post-war grey, pebbledashed facade of the surrounding buildings. In Budapest, a stretch of wall is much more immediately visible in the courtyard of the Dohány Street synagogue in central Pest where it stands as a very intentional communist-era memorial. The differing visibilities reflect the very different fates of these two ghettos. In Budapest, the ghetto walls and gates mattered in the post-war communist era due to the unique story of this ghetto being liberated—by the Red Army—rather than being liquidated and razed to the ground, as was the case in Warsaw. As the text of communist-era memorials reveals, in Budapest a story was told of the Soviets as those who broke down ghetto walls. The plaque close to one of the former gates of the Pest ghetto celebrated the moment when ‘the liberating Soviet Army broke down the ghetto walls on 18 January 1945’, while a short distance away the plaque on the stretch of ghetto wall served ‘as an eternal reminder of the day forty years ago when the wall surrounding the only ghetto remaining in Europe was broken down by the Soviet Army, liberators of our homeland’.

The language of Soviet liberation is one that was common across communist Europe, but the specificity of Budapest as the single remaining ghetto in Europe meant that this story could be, and was, celebrated on the remaining ghetto walls. In contrast, by the time the Red Army entered Warsaw, few of the city's Jews were still alive and next to nothing remained of the infrastructure of the ghetto (or the wider city). The Warsaw ghetto population were taken to Treblinka in a series of deportations beginning in the summer of 1942, and the remains of the ghetto razed when the ghetto uprising was brutally crushed in the spring of 1943. The mass deportations and Jewish uprising formed the two sides of the early post-war memorial in Warsaw by Natan Rapoport that offered a very different narrative from the early post-war memorials in Budapest.