Visualizing nutritional terrain: a geospatial analysis of pedestrian produce accessibility in Lansing, Michigan, USA

This article considers how geospatial analyses can influence cartographic outputs in studies of the spatial structure of food environments. We make two contributions. First, we present a new approach to conceiving and visualizing urban food environments as ‘nutritional terrains’, in which the opportunities and costs of locating (healthful) food vary continuously across space. While other researchers have conceptualized and represented food environments as continuous phenomena, we use detailed data to produce maps of food accessibility that have high resolution both spatially and in terms of food availability. Second, we show that decisions made about measuring and modelling food accessibility can create artifactual patterns independently of actual variation in food-environment characteristics. Although the type of method-driven patterning we identify will not surprise cartographers, we argue that non-geographers using geographic information technologies to visualize food environments must give greater attention to the unintended consequences of choices made in geospatial analyses.