Making Buffalo Urban Food System Networks Visible

Working with different stakeholders and local communities in Buffalo, we (Emmanuel Frimpong Boamah, Zachary Korosh, Samina Raja, Yeeli Mui, Martha Bohm, Allison DeHonney, Rebekah Williams, Carol Ramos-Gerena and myself) make visible the social network infrastructure of people sustaining the urban food system in the post-industrial city of Buffalo, NY.

Abstract: 

This article makes visible the social network infrastructure of people sustaining the urban food system in the  post-industrial city of Buffalo, NY. It does so by probing how networks are launched and sustained over time,  who is responsible for the networks, and to what end. The authors employ a survey to collect data on social  networks among actors within the city’s food system. The findings suggest that Buffalo’s urban food system is a  constellation of close-knit networks comprised primarily of local grassroots organizations having ‘small world’  effects— that is, short chains of actors within the network link all actors. These central actors rely on their high  levels of trust and shared beliefs and vision to socially reproduce, sustain, and strengthen their urban food system  through advocacy and information sharing. In sum, we find that Buffalo’s food system story is one of local self-reliance, co-production, and co-dependency among urban growers and other grassroots actors whose day-to-day  practices and lived experiences are largely excluded from the municipal government’s policies and decisions.

Full References: 

Frimpong Boamah, E., Yin, F., Korosh, Z., Raja, S., Mui, Y., Bohm, M., DeHonney, A., Williams, R., & Ramos-Gerena, C. (2024). Mapping the invisible: Bridging and trusting networks in sustaining the urban food system. Cities, 146, 104750. Available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cities.2023.104750 (pdf)

Mapping actors’ structure positions based on (a) degree and (b) betweenness centralities. The plots on top are the density distributions of centralities. The plots on bottom visualize the food networks by scaling each node’s size based on their respective centrality metrics. The colors of node indicate the actor’s primary responsibilities in urban food system. The top five actors with highest centralities are marked using black dots.

Visualizations depicting the purpose of relationship among actors within Buffalo’s urban food network. Edges fulfilling a particular purpose are colored in red and given higher weight, otherwise in grey. N denotes the number of edges fulfilling a particular purpose. Nodes’ size is proportional to their degree centrality (i.e., number of connections). Edges with no data on their purposes are hidden from the plots to improve clarity of visualization. 

 Quadrant plot evaluating actors’ social capital by their roles in the food network. The x-axis variable measures the embeddedness (i.e., degree centrality) and the y-axis variable calculates the brokerage (i.e., betweenness centrality). The horizontal and vertical lines indicate the upper quartile in each variable.