Local governance and economic adaptation under crisis: Spatial inequality and digital mediation in urban food economies

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerabilities of local food economies and the governance challenges involved in sustaining urban economic activity during systemic disruption. This article examines how local food economies adapted through a comparative qualitative analysis of Porto (Portugal) and João Pessoa (Brazil). Drawing on interviews, documentary analysis and case-study methods, it investigates how governance arrangements, spatial organisation, digital mediation and socio-economic conditions shaped differentiated adaptation trajectories. The findings show that local economic resilience did not result simply from entrepreneurial capacity or individual policy measures, but from interactions between institutional coordination, access to public space, digital infrastructures and locally embedded resources. Porto benefited from relatively integrated governance arrangements, favourable urban morphology and greater institutional capacity to mobilise digital infrastructures, whereas João Pessoa displayed alternative adaptation pathways based on entrepreneurial flexibility, informal networks and locally negotiated responses within a more fragmented institutional context. The article introduces the concept of Selective Urban Resilience to explain how adaptive capacity is unevenly produced and distributed across businesses, neighbourhoods and territories. By integrating perspectives from place-based development, urban resilience and digital transformation, the study contributes to debates on local economic governance and highlights the importance of designing more inclusive adaptive strategies under conditions of uncertainty.