How food moves around cities

Ever wonder where your food comes from and how it gets to your plate? The answer is far more complicated than you’d imagine, involving a network of systems that span local, regional, and global scales, each influenced by geography, policy, and community dynamics, according to Domenic Vitiello, an associate professor of city and regional planning at the University of Pennsylvania’s Weitzman School of Design.

Vitiello, who holds a secondary appointment in the Department of History in the School of Arts & Sciences, teaches courses that that take students in and around Philadelphia to better understand where food comes from in cities, affording them a unique opportunity to see how history shapes the ways in which meals make their way to peoples’ plates.

“Urban agriculture has been a big part of my work for more than 15 years,” Vitiello says, “and as a Philly native I think it’s such an exciting way to expand on the already substantial experiential teaching we do in urban studies with coursework that gets the students really immersed in our city’s food supply networks.”

In the graduate-level city planning class Metropolitan Food Systems, taught in the spring of even-numbered years, Vitiello emphasizes the dynamic interactions between urban communities and their food environments, ranging from mapping food accessibility in neighborhoods to understanding the role of community gardens and local markets in shaping the urban food landscape. His fall course, The Urban Food Chain, focuses on understanding urban community food systems and developing undergraduates’ broad literacies in social and environmental science and the humanities.

Both courses involve a significant amount of field trips, allowing the students to engage directly with the communities and spaces that make up Philadelphia’s diverse food system.

“The food environment includes all sorts of things we take for granted, well beyond grocery stores and restaurants,” Vitiello explains. “These courses urge my students to consider how institutions like schools, mosques, churches, community kitchens, and even public transportation networks play a role in food access and security.”

Different plates, different places

Last spring, Bakari Joy Clark, a second-year dual degree student in Weitzman’s City & Regional Planning and Landscape Architecture programs, signed up for Metropolitan Food Systems for two main reasons: a lifelong love of food and a newfound appreciation for its ability to engage communities.

“Growing up with family in North Carolina,” she recalls, “food was how community was happening. Every time we came together, it was around a table and a lot of the folks on my dad’s side grew their own food.”

Clark notes how these early experiences piqued her interest in how food makes its way from the soil to the plate, but it wasn’t until her time as an undergraduate, when she attended an impactful talk led by an advocate for access to healthy food in underserved neighborhoods, Olympia Auset, where she learned firsthand how growing food in Black communities could be a “powerful way to reconnect people with their cultural heritage and promote health in those communities.”

“I guess you could say the talk really planted a seed in me,” Clark says, and she began researching the history and current state of Black farming in the U.S., discovering that Black farmers made up less than 2% of the country’s 3.4 million producers. Clark also led a Philadelphia tree-planting effort through Jasmine Thompson’s Philly Forests initiative.

At Penn, driven by the growing, newfound passion, Clark sought to pursue a broader understanding of the larger societal landscapes and conditions that create food inequality in urban settings. One of her first classes at the University was Vitiello’s Introduction to City and Regional Planning: History, Theory, and Practice.

“What’s really nice about Domenic is that even though he’s a Philly guy through and through, his academic career’s taken him all over and he’s got a cool, well-rounded view of things that’s not homed in on the stuff going on in the U.S., but the world writ large,” Clark says. “So, we got to learn a lot about international city challenges and their approaches, both historically and in contemporary settings.”

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Clark notes how in Metropolitan Food Systems, Vitiello challenged the students from the start with a hands-on assignment that set the stage for the course. “He asked us to prepare a meal,” she says. “So, we had to bring in food that was gathered in a specific way, whether it was from a farmers market, a fair-trade product, or even something foraged from a community garden or a local park like the Wissahickon.”

Foraging, Vitiello explains, isn’t just about finding food, “it’s about exploring the city in ways that force you to confront some the realities of urban life.” He connects the students with experts and provides online resources at Wild Foodies of Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Orchard Project, and encourages the students to venture out into the city to find edible plants and other food sources.

The assignment, and a few others, are intentionally open-ended, Vitiello says, allowing students to discover not only the physical aspects of the food environment but also the social and economic inequalities that shape access to food.

Putting the right ingredients together

In cities around the world, access to food for many is a pervasive problem, Vitiello notes, and urban areas in the Global South, for example, often struggle with issues like food deserts and unreliable food distribution networks, which can lead to significant disparities in food security.

He adds that many of these international concerns are mirrored in cities in the U.S. and are the subject of a chapter he wrote for the recently published book, “Planning for Equitable Urban Agriculture in the United States: Future Directions for a New Ethic in City Building.”

In the chapter, Vitiello details the history of community gardens in Philadelphia since their inception over the last century, noting that some that have thrived while others have been lost to development, revealing a tension between treating urban agriculture as a temporary use of land and recognizing it as a long-term public good.

“This tension is not just theoretical; it plays out in the work of local activists and organizations,” Vitiello says. For example, his longtime friend, Iris Brown, who helped create and oversee the community gardens at Norris Square, exemplifies this struggle.

A native of Puerto Rico, Brown moved to Philadelphia more than 40 years ago and became a leading figure in the formation of the gardens through the Grupo Motivos, a group of mothers and community members determined to eradicate gang violence in the area. Last semester, Vitiello brought his students to visit Brown at the Norris Square Gardens, where she shared her personal story and the history of how the gardens were created as a response to community needs.

“We needed a safe place for our children, a place where we could grow our own food and teach the younger generations about their heritage,” Brown told the students. Drawing on her memories of Puerto Rican traditions, she began to focus on what she could do to help her community, which culminated in the gardens that became spaces where people “could gather, cook, and share their stories.”

“We put seating spots around so we would make coffee or tea for whoever passes by, and just talk to them, just ask them, ‘What’s going on? How do you feel? Is everything OK?’”

The gardens also became a canvas for artistic and cultural expression, with murals and exhibits celebrating Puerto Rican history and identity. Vitiello told the Penn class, “part of what you’ll see here is in many ways a set of exhibits commemorating various parts of Puerto Rican culture, identity, and history, along with a celebration of the diaspora’s African heritage.”

After the students toured some of the artworks and learned more about the gardens from Brown and volunteers, Vitiello’s former student, Ash Richards, a Master of City Planning graduate, stopped by to explain some of the work they do in the Department of Parks and Recreation, how they created their role as the director of Urban Agriculture, and provided a real-world example of how urban planning and agriculture can intersect to change communities.

“I often tell people, ‘You don’t have to be a farmer to change the food system. You can be a planner, a teacher, and a community organizer.’” Richards said to the students, encouraging them to creatively think about how they could apply their skills to address food issues like food insecurity. Whether it’s through policy or design, it’s about growing communities, building resilience, and ensuring everyone has a seat at the table.