The Public Dimension of Urban Food Infrastructures: Advancing Conceptualisation and Unpacking Public Sector Roles

In recent decades, cities have developed diverse urban food governance innovations, ranging from integrated food strategies to translocal alliances and targeted programmes. While these efforts have advanced systemic and multi-actor approaches, questions remain about their material grounding, inclusivity, embeddedness in urban dynamics, and impact. Emerging scholarship has begun to explore urban food infrastructures (UFIs) to better understand how the material and relational foundations of urban food systems shape sustainability and food security outcomes. At the same time, public food infrastructures are increasingly championed in policy recommendations as key to building just and resilient food systems. However, conceptual clarity and analytical frameworks for examining UFIs and their governance remain limited. Drawing on insights from governance, urban, and infrastructure studies, we develop an analytical framework to advance the definition of UFIs and unpack the diverse public roles involved in governing them. This framework is applied to three types of infrastructures in Barcelona: urban community gardens, cooperatives, and food insecurity initiatives. Findings show that UFIs are relationally constituted and politically embedded, revealing multiple public sector roles that challenge conventional understandings of public infrastructures and state-led action. By advancing the conceptualisation of UFIs, the article offers a new entry point for urban food governance that connects material, relational, and political dimensions; contributes to policy debates on accountability for public sector action and inaction; and highlights the importance of further interrogating the publicness of infrastructures in shaping just and resilient urban food futures within a post-2030 agenda.