Changing Urban Food Environments

Changing Urban Food Environments explores how digital urban food environments are transformed through the intertwined dynamics of platform power, corporeality, and sustainability. Drawing on mixed-methods research across India and multi-sited insights from Mexico, Germany, and the United States, it demonstrates how digital platforms, everyday food practices, and socio-economic inequalities jointly shape health and environmental sustainability for urban futures.

Bringing together digital studies, food environment research, social practice theory, and critical syndemics, the book develops an integrative framework for understanding food environments in the digital era. It introduces original concepts including the Urban Food Environments Periscope, aspirational eating, outside foods, nutrition milestones, and metabolic stratifications, alongside the visual Space-Time-Sustainability (STS) Cube framework for mixed-methods integration. Combining on- and offline ethnographic fieldwork, interviews, participatory mapping, questionnaires, GPS tracking, food diaries, anthropometric and biochemical measurements, and spatio-temporal visualisation, the book demonstrates how qualitative and quantitative approaches can be integrated to examine food practices, health inequalities, and environmental sustainability across multiple urban scales.

This book is intended for researchers, postgraduate students, and advanced undergraduate students in geography, food studies, urban studies, sustainability research, public health, digital studies, anthropology, sociology, and planning. It will also be valuable for practitioners and policymakers working on urban food systems, digital governance, public health, and sustainable city development.