Food Insecurity in Amsterdam Noord: Experiences of Infrastructural Violence in an Urban Food Environment

Jonathan Luger and Marjoleine van der Meij
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Jonathan Luger: Athena Institute, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Marjoleine van der Meij: Athena Institute, VU University Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Urban Planning, 2025, vol. 10

Abstract: Urban food insecurity in high‐income countries is rising, and its health outcomes and determinants have been well documented. There are, however, limited qualitative, place‐based studies of how people become, or remain, food insecure, especially in EU cities. This article introduces infrastructural violence to explore the complexities of food insecurity and its underlying (infra)structural causes in the urban food environment of Amsterdam’s northern city district, Noord, since the Covid‐19 pandemic. We build on interviews (2023–2024) with 28 food bank users, volunteers, funders and network representatives, social workers, and municipal staff, carried out in a community geography project. Our findings show a complex interplay of food retail, urban development, welfare, and community food bank infrastructures. Key findings are that urban development affects food security in various ways, and that welfare and community food bank infrastructures, which ideally alleviate food insecurity, can, in fact, exclude people from accessing healthy and affordable food and cause additional harms of administrative burdens, fear, and shame. We further trace the identified infrastructures as place‐based embodiments of wider structures, variably including: housing marketization, supermarket corporatization, historical relations between residents and the state, welfare bureaucratisation, social service decentralization, and austerity politics. This study illuminates the (infra)structural complexities underpinning food insecurity in a changing urban food environment, and discusses their implications for urban food governance research and policymaking.

Keywords: Amsterdam; community geography; food insecurity; infrastructural violence; structural violence; urban food environment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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