Beyond individual food spaces: comparative metropolitan segregation and the infrastructural scale of community kitchens in three South American capitals

While the proliferation of community food services (CFS) during the COVID-19 pandemic has been documented as a local survival strategy, its implications for metropolitan-scale theory remain underexplored. This paper moves beyond the analysis of individual food sites to examine CFS as a structural component of socio-spatial segregation in Latin American cities. Through a comparative study of 114 boroughs in Lima, Montevideo and Santiago, we analyse how different institutional environments and historical segregation patterns shape the density and reach of these networks. Our findings identify a ‘Southern perspective’ on urban infrastructure, where food networks function as bridges across fragmented metropolitan spaces. By contrasting these South American cases with established Northern-centric literature, this research proposes a conceptual adaptation of ‘people as infrastructure’ that accounts for the entrenched inequalities of the Americas. We conclude that recognising the infrastructural scale of CFS is essential for a global comparative urbanism that addresses the structural rather than merely incidental role of community solidarity.