Ms Laine Young¹, Dr Alison Blay-Palmer¹

¹Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada

This presentation explores the author’s dissertation research with urban growers in Quito, Ecuador. Quito’s urban agriculture (UA) project, AGRUPAR, is wildly successful in promoting urban food growth, equity, economic development and bettering the urban environment. Through their training programs, infrastructure development and the establishment of organic markets throughout the city, AGRUPAR has enabled Quito’s urban poor, mostly women (80% of participants), to find success in growing and raising food in the city. While the project has been extremely successful, the participants identified areas for potential growth: increased, self-sufficient funding; knowledge sharing; and increased participation. The author will be using a feminist political ecology (FPE) analysis with a focus on intersectionality to collaborate with the participants to ensure equity within the project and to expand the reach in a way that takes the lived experience of the participants into account. Based on Rebecca Elmhirst’s work on FPE, a modified conceptual framework will be used that emphasizes key FPE principles such as: emphasizing power and politics at different scales, challenging dominant ways of knowing, exploring connections between social location and subject formation and understanding complex relations between nature and society. This intersectional analysis will influence the way forward for UA in Quito.

Biography:

Laine Young is a Phd Candidate (ABD) and Contract Academic Staff Member in the Geography and Environmental Studies department at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. Sheis affiliated with the Laurier Centre for Sustainable Food Systems. Laine integrates a feminist lens to her dissertation research in Quito, Ecuador to understand the inequity and unequal power relations present in experiences of urban agriculture. layoung@wlu.ca