Collective Strategies and Spatialities of Neighborhood Food Coproduction during COVID-19 Pandemic

This paper explores the strategies and spatiality of neighborhood food coproduction during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. The COVID-19 pandemic has created global food instability, requiring collective strategies to source and transform food for people in need. This paper is particularly interested in the neighborhood-driven coproduction of food for the rising rate of home-isolated COVID-19 patients, which generates new spatial programming and interconnections between dwellings, the neighborhood, and the city. This paper examines these issues using Twitter data, harnessing 141,208 tweets related to COVID-19 and neighborhoods in Indonesia. These tweets are then further filtered to provide 128 food-related tweets, which are then analyzed using categorical and networked revelation analysis. The analysis demonstrates strategies of food coproduction, including sourcing food ingredients, managing daily food transformation, and creating centralized structures. The spatiality of food coproduction highlights neighborhood accessibility, food placement structures, and dwelling configurations. The food coproduction strategies exist as a dynamic and responsive approach toward the fluctuating conditions of neighborhood dwellers, shaping the spatiality of the neighborhood and heightening the residents’ resilience.

Coproduction; COVID-19; Food; Neighborhood; Twitter

In This paper discusses strategies of food coproduction during the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia and explores the spatiality of such coproduction in the context of urban neighborhoods. Coproduction has been recognized as a vital aspect of pandemic responses that leans on community empowerment to assist overburdened public services (Berawi et al., 2020; Miao et al., 2021). Food has been an eminent issue of coproduction during the pandemic, with the imbalance of global supply systems and rising issues of unequal access to food (Hobbs, 2020; Sardeshpande et al., 2021). Spatially, discussion about food coproduction during the pandemic has often been limited to the production of raw food material and, therefore, has largely focused on areas outside living spaces to generate food resources, such as urban gardens (Sardeshpande et al., 2021), overlooking the wider complexity of food procurement in relation to other pandemic conditions.

    This article explores the strategies and spatiality of food coproduction in the event of a rising rate of home-isolated COVID-19 patients. Addressing such a condition draws attention to various food processes other than food gardening. Exploring these processes potentially allows a richer understanding of the different fragments of a city’s livelihood. This article consider urban and architectural theories that discuss food, coproduction, and the relevance of coproduction as a neighborhood response during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study utilizes Twitter data harnessed during the surge of the second wave of COVID-19 in Indonesia, which took place between June and July 2021. During this period of enforced limitations on movement, such data provide insights into individual neighborhood experiences in response to the pandemic (Booth et al., 2018). Twitter narratives are explored to highlight important patterns in food coproduction strategies and spatiality, demonstrating the importance of food coproduction during COVID-19 and its implications for the discourse on coproduction in the built environment. 

This article explores neighborhood food coproduction strategies and spatiality in response to the varied conditions of home-isolating patients in neighborhoods in Indonesia. The Twitter study visualized in Figures 2 and 4 highlights the organization of different food process strategies happening in the neighborhood in light of the patients’ differing conditions and the availability of resources. The study concludes by addressing how these strategies inform new spatial programming between the dwelling, neighborhood, and the city.

The spatial programming of these food coproduction strategies enables a particular flow of food and people through the organization of neighborhood accessibility, food placement structures, and dwelling configuration and orientation. Neighborhood accessibility enables the frequency and variety of food sourcing possibilities. Food placement structures become an important intersection between public and private areas, influencing the direction of food flow, as well as the frequency of the food provider. The food coproduction process also provides an important opportunity to observe the patient’s condition. The orientation of the dwelling and the visibility of the surfaces create opportunities for interaction and observation during food delivery, ensuring regular updates on the patient’s health condition.

Neighborhood food coproduction demonstrates dynamic possibilities for managing the community’s food needs based on the precarious conditions of the patients. It shows that the flows and processes of food are shaped by the complex spatial interrelation between the dwelling, neighborhood, and wider city context, which continuously changes during the pandemic. Further exploration of the Twitter narratives may uncover further social and spatial processes happening in society during the pandemic.

    The research on which this article is based is supported by Penelitian Dasar 2021, a research grant provided by the Directorate General of Research and Development at The Ministry of Research and Technology/National Research and Innovation Agency, Republic Indonesia, under the Grant Number NKB-039/UN2.RST/HKP.05.00/2021.

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