Enacting food democracy through neighbourhood food infrastructures: insights from Ghent’s socio-spatial contexts

This study explores how neighbourhood kitchens in Ghent contribute to food democracy and how these practices are shaped by their socio-spatial and governance contexts. Drawing on a qualitative multi-sited ethnography combining interviews, participant observation, participatory workshops, focus groups and digital ethnography, the research examines how democratic food practices are enacted across everyday community food initiatives.

The findings demonstrate that food democracy is primarily realised through situated practices of cooking, sharing, organising and collective care rather than through formal political participation. Participation emerged as fundamentally dependent on socio-spatial infrastructures, including shared kitchens, relational networks, organisational continuity and everyday practices of infrastructuring. Neighbourhood kitchens functioned simultaneously as spaces of learning, solidarity, mutual support and democratic experimentation, while remaining constrained by volunteer dependency, fragmented governance arrangements, unstable funding and broader structural inequalities. The study further highlights important tensions surrounding accessibility, affordability, inclusion and surplus food redistribution, illustrating that democratic participation depends not only on individual motivation but also on the material, relational and organisational conditions that enable collective action.

The research contributes to food democracy scholarship by integrating democratic theory with socio-spatial and infrastructural perspectives. It argues that food democracy is best understood not as participation alone, but as an ongoing socio-spatial process through which democratic capacities are collectively organised, negotiated and maintained. In doing so, the study advances debates on relational food governance, social infrastructure and agroecological urbanism, while identifying implications for future research on volunteer sustainability, shared food infrastructures and pluriversal approaches to urban food democracy.