Alimentare la città. Limiti e potenzialità delle Alternative Food Network nella ridefinizione dei rapporti città-campagna

Originally defined and conceived as practices of resistance in front of a globalizing food market, Alternative Food Networks (AFNs) have recently gained a growing international scientific attention and policy support. Despite a great heterogeneity of forms and models, AFNs are generally conceived as new ways to organize the social and spatial relationships between food production, distribution and consumption, with a strong attention to the issues of sustainability, quality and justice. Moving from a geographical perspective, we propose an innovative research path to analyze AFNs in terms of a new system of relations between cities and rural areas. In fact, by looking at AFNs, cities and rural areas may be intended as part of a whole local food system, founded on the co-existence of multiple networks, both conventional and innovative, on the same territory. In the paper, opportunities and limits of this perspective are explored.