Food Justice, Hunger and the City Nik Heynen* University of Georgia 1 Abstract We are amidst a long-overdue increase of interest in issues related food, cities and inequality within geography. While there has certainly been significant scholarship done on the issue, this area seems to be on the verge of defining many other sub-disciplinary trajectories as opposed to the opposite which has historically been the case. In this short review essay, we hope to signal the utility of the concepts of community food security, food sovereignty and urban agriculture for conceptually linking food, justice, and cities. Introduction Geography, and its cognate disciplines, is taking food politics more seriously now than historically has been the case. With a long tradition of engaging with social, political and economic inequality, geographers can offer valuable insights into struggles over access to healthy food, and struggles for food justice more broadly. Inequitable access to healthy food is widely recognized as a significant facet of geographies of urban inequality (see Alkon and Agyeman 2011; Gottlieb and Fischer 1996; Wekerle 2004). In this short review essay, we hope to signal the utility of the concepts of community food security, food sovereignty and urban agriculture for conceptually linking food, justice, and cities. Each of these terms have been mobilized to grapple with the geography of urban inequal- ity, and we suggest that they offer insights into the origins of, and possible responses to, urban hunger and food insecurity. First, we discuss the production of inequality in indus- trialized food systems, with a focus on urban expressions of inequality. Next, we discuss the concepts of community food security and food sovereignty, as they have been theo- rized and researched by geographers and others. We then situate urban agriculture, and a body of work on it, within these frameworks to suggest new approaches to researching food, justice and the city. The Production of Inequality in the Industrial Food System Broadly, food systems can be defined as ‘‘[t]he set of activities and relationships that inter- act to determine what, how much, by what method and for whom food is produced and distributed’’ (Whatmore 1995:35; also see Nestle and McIntosh 2010). The industrial food system that supplies the vast majority of food eaten in North America has come under multi-faceted critique. State subsidies stimulate the overproduction of key agricultural commodities like corn, making them cheaper and more widely available, but glutting the market and pushing prices downward in a global market (Goodman and Watts 1997; Guthman and DuPuis 2006; McMichael 2008, 2009). Driving this overproduction are neoliberal trade regimes and the corporate monopolization of agriculture, which have contributed to the decline G E C 3 4 8 6 B Dispatch: 6.3.12 Journal: GEC3 CE: Anusha Journal Name Manuscript No. Author Received: No. of pages: 8 PE: Pouline Geography Compass (2012): 1–8, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2012.00486.x ª 2012 The Author Geography Compass ª 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49