Chinatown’s Food Network: A Story of Food, Immigration, Zoning, & Informality
The project aims to map the food networks of Chinatown. Through mapping and through network analyses, understand its necessary preconditions, such as land use zoning or community networks, and its impacts on the people that support the network and/or are serviced by it.
The project also spans a temporal scale. It will investigate how the network has changed between 2005 and now; using Covid-19 as a probe to uncover its resilience and/or vulnerability.
I aim to extract a replicable model that can serve as a healthier, culturally sensitive and economically viable alternative to a different community, but also, perhaps, more importantly, advocate for the existing one by establishing its value and delivering a narrative that can garner the network more support. The project begins by first georeferencing the 2005 data in the book From Farm to Canal Street by Valerie Imbruse, allowing me to then bring it into conversation with secondary spatial data and data I collect on my own, both qualitative and quantitative.
The goal of the project is twofold. The first is almost archival in a sense. To capture this food network in its current condition, and bring in other datasets to better represent and understand it, from land use zoning and census data. But the archival work is also intended to be a form of advocacy. Current NYC food network analysis, such as the Five Borough Food Flow report, completely disregards Chinatown’s food network despite it being vital to a core population within the city. Most, if not all of the city’s food policy documents calls for the renovation and further funding of Hunts Point Terminal, giving no thought to alternatives that could host wholesale produce distribution in a way that integrates community jobs and food needs. I hope that measuring and communicating the impacts of this food network can raise their visibility and build the type of political support that systems like Hunts Point receive. That is why, almost as important as understanding and representing the specific features of the food network itself and how they contribute to its efficiencies, is understanding and representing the different systems it is situated within and how its relationships with these systems play out into a narrative. I intend to package all my analysis within an interactive website of multi-media data journalism.