five - Networks: connections and interactions

Summary

If there is one thing on which there is agreement, it is that you cannot share alone. Interactions between people, mediated by the socio-technologies, social norms and practices and regulatory regimes outlined in Chapters Three and Four, are the lifeblood of sharing. The motivations for these interactions and the resultant exchanges have been at the very centre of previous research examining beyond-kin sharing within small-scale, hunter-gatherer or foraging-horticultural societies (see Kaplan et al, 2012). Sharing initiatives in contemporary urban environments similarly involve a whole range of interactions, including those between people directly involved in sharing as donors, recipients or intermediaries, but also between those who share and actors with whom they intersect in the urban setting. The multifaceted and multifunctional nature of sharing, outlined in Chapter Two, means that sharing initiatives frequently interact with a range of other organisations from public, private and civil society sectors; some voluntarily and some by necessity. Indeed, research uncovered assemblages of urban food sharing, with initiatives interacting with each other as well as with other organisations (Edwards and Davies, 2018); assemblages that are dynamic, with connections being forged, evolving and disappearing across time and space. These relational geographies of urban food sharing, and the dynamic networks of actors and actants that facilitate them, provide the main focus of this chapter, which will be illustrated by the experiences and activities of initiatives operating in contrasting contexts around the world, from Melbourne to London and from Berlin to Singapore. The first section examines the nature of interactions among sharers that are sought by individual initiatives. Here particular attention is paid to three key goals of urban sharing initiatives: the cultivation of connections, care and learning. The second section widens the net of analysis beyond those who share directly within a single initiative and focuses on how sharing initiatives as entities interact with other organisations both within and beyond their immediate environs. Finally, the chapter reflects on both of these sets of relational processes and the benefits and challenges that initiatives face when cultivating connections around food.

Cultivating connections

As outlined in Chapter One, sharing can be motivated by a whole range of drivers, from reciprocal altruism to cooperative acquisition and costly signalling (Kaplan and Gurven, 2005).