Jane Battersby

Malls, Markets, and Malnutrition: Food In/Sensitive Planning in African Cities

Food security and urban systems governance are not widely acknowledged as falling within local government mandates in African cities. However, urban policies and planning profoundly shape urban food systems and the urban conditions that drive food insecurity and malnutrition. The state’s engagement with the food system is informed by historical policy and planning legacies overlaid with decontextualized imported ideals from the global north. This lecture presents findings from research conducted in South Africa, Kenya, Zambia and Zimbabwe to frame the impacts of existing planning on food security, but also the potential for more food sensitive planning to emerge.

Jane Battersby is a senior researcher at the African Centre for Cities at the University of Cape Town. Her current areas of particular interest are urban food systems, urban food policies and the construction of food security theory in Northern and Southern research contexts. This work has both theoretical and applied components, and explicitly seeks to work across a range of spatial and governance scales.

She has been the Cape Town Partner of the African Food Security Urban Network (AFSUN) since 2008. She was the Research Coordinator of the recently completed  ESRC/DFID-funded Consuming Urban Poverty Project, is associated with the Hungry Cities Programme, and is the PI of the IDRC-funded Nourishing Spaces project.

Jane is the Premio Daniel Carasso 2017 laureate. She is actively engaged in international, national, provincial and local government policy process, having acted in an advisory or consultative position at these levels, and currently a member of the South African Vulnerability Assessment Committee (SAVAC). Jane serves on the advisory boards of several international research projects and a member of the Independent Expert Group of the Global Nutrition Report.

Jane holds a PhD from Oxford University, a Masters from the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne and a BSc(Hons) from Kings College, London.