The mountain, the milk and the market: Producing space through urban food supply chains

Abstract

The paper engages in the circulation of dairy from the hinterland to urban centers. Focusing on the actors and technical infrastructures that organize the circulation of milk produced in the Vosges mountains and the Black Forest, we examine the social conditions of the production of a product, dairy, and of a space, the hinterlands of Strasbourg and Freiburg. This Lefebvre-inspired approach also uptakes to Urban Political Ecology’s (Heynen et al., 2006) insights on urban metabolism (Desvaux, 2017).

The analysis centers on the concept of socio-technical infrastructures, understood in the Foucauldian sense (2004), as a set of norms, social practices, technical devices and physical settings that allow or constrain movements of materials in space and time (Garcier et al., 2017). We argue that socio-technical infrastructures exercise power as they contribute to produce certain forms of social organization (via social practices and power-relationships) and spaces (crossed by these circulations) (Lefebvre, 2000). Thus, socio-technical infrastructures are political instruments of socio-spatial production (McFarlane & Rutherford, 2008) that impede or facilitate the socio-ecological transformation of agricultural landscapes and urban metabolisms.

Here, we focus on the ways dairy actors involved in Alternative Food Networks negotiate with these socio-technical infrastructures: we question what they do to those who are bound to them and who participate in (re)producing them. The analysis is based on a case study comparison of dairy supply chains in the Upper Rhine region as well as on empirical data mostly retrieved from 50 interviews conducted in 2022 and 2023 with producers, operators and distributors. Qualitative data was collected using the method “follow the thing” (Cook, 2004) that traces pathways and maps actors along dairy supply chains.

Our study indicates that pedoclimatic settings and logistic infrastructures significantly influence the social organization of dairy production and circulation. Pastoral farming based on extensive breeding dominates the Vosges mountains and the Black Forest since natural settings prevent industrial development. A minority of farmers located in remote areas not serviced by a dairy operator process dairy on-site and sell high value-added handcraft products through AFNs at the urban market as their only viable outlet. Next to it, dairy industrials build on existing pastoral farming structures and growing market share on quality products (such as grassland or organic milk) to structure long dairy chains that supply regional or national markets. These outlined elements indicate that the production of products (handcraft or industrial dairy), spaces (pastoral hinterlands), and forms of social organization (Alternative Food Networks or dairy industries) results from the ways dairy actors, with uneven resources and agency, negotiate with socio-technical infrastructures to respond to urban demands.