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Avoiding the Local Trap: Scale and Food Systems in Planning Research

Branden Born and Mark PurcellView all authors and affiliations

Volume 26, Issue 2

https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X06291389

Abstract
References

Abstract

A strong current of food-systems research holds that local food systems are preferable to systems at larger scales. Many assume that eating local food is more ecologically sustainable and socially just. We term this the local trap and argue strongly against it. We draw on current scale theory in political and economic geography to argue that local food systems are no more likely to be sustainable or just than systems at other scales. The theory argues that scale is socially produced: scales (and their interrelations) are not independent entities with inherent qualities but strategies pursued by social actors with a particular agenda. It is the content of that agenda, not the scales themselves, that produces outcomes such as sustainability or justice. As planners move increasingly into food-systems research, we argue it is critical to avoid the local trap. The article’s theoretical approach to scale offers one way to do so.

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1. This is admittedly an ugly word, but we want to be very specific about the process. The terms industrialization and globalization are misleading since they can be capitalist or not, and it is specifically the capitalist logics of industrialization (and its globalization strategy) that result in the negative effects cited by the research.

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