Building an Unjust Foodscape: Shifting Governance Regimes, Urban Place Making and the Making of Chinese Food as Ordinary in Hong Kong

This paper’s contribution to research on food and social justice or food justice is threefold. Firstly the paper considers how the processes that shape urban space also contribute to the production of food injustice. This intervention pushes the food justice literature to consider how contextual drivers linked to urban governance are key forces that shape access to food in cities. The second contribution critiques the current emphasis on race-based disadvantage and white privilege by considering how racism as an aspect of food injustice can have shifting influence. Finally, the vast majority of food justice research focuses on the United States, which goes some way toward explaining why race and white privilege play such an important role in current explanations. This paper draws on the context of Hong Kong to highlight how the ways in which place-making projects shift over time and how these spatial projects impact on food injustice. These three research interventions extend the concept and applicability of food justice to make it a more international concept, while at the same time open the concept out to new groups of people who also struggle to feed themselves.