The word “place” gets thrown around a lot in food systems work, often as a kind of soft accent — a way of saying “local” with a little more warmth. We use it more precisely.
A place is a set of specific conditions.
A place is the specific, particular set of conditions in which a food system has to operate: who owns the land, who shops where, what the soil does, which roads connect which neighborhoods, who trusts which institutions, what people eat at home, what the zoning code allows, what closed down in 2008 and never reopened.
A food project that ignores these specifics produces generic answers to specific problems, which is to say, no answers at all.
Placemaking is the discipline that closes the gap.
Placemaking — the discipline of designing physical spaces around the people who use them — is the work that closes that gap. A food market that ignores how its neighborhood actually moves through the day, what languages get spoken there, who feels welcome and who doesn’t, is a food market that will fail on a Tuesday afternoon even if the spreadsheet says it should work.
This is one of the reasons Abby’s training is load-bearing for the way we work. The food-and-tech side of our practice would be incomplete without it.
We don’t build food infrastructure that ignores the place it lives in.