Third Natures? Reconstituting Space through Place- making Strategies for Sustainability

The recent rises in food prices represent the ‘tip of the iceberg’ and a ‘canary in the mine’ moment for world agriculture. They are underlain by a continuing race to the bottom and by speculative processes whereby systems of resource production and exploitation are continuing to rely upon ‘infinite supply’ assumptions and narrow technological solutions to world hunger. It is argued here that these conditions are leading to a dominant and aggregated policy framing that tends to marginalize diverse and place-based agro-ecological systems, through the creation of a renewed legitimacy for bio-economic, rather than eco-economic, solutions. Nevertheless, the current food crisis is also providing opportunities for more place-based and reflexive governance arrangements. This article outlines the relationships between these bio-economic, and alternative eco-economic, strategies and focuses on some of the key articulation mechanisms between the two paradigms. Of key importance here is understanding the reconstitution of space and state processes in these contested but innovative articulations. Introduction: Towards Adaptive Capacity Building The burgeoning critical agri-food literature has now reached an important stage in its maturity. The plethora of work on alternative food networks (see Goodman et al., 2011) has undoubtedly re-energized agri-food studies in ways that have again made it central to wider rural sociological debates. some even argue (see Friedland et al., 2010) that this new phase – one of investigating how alternative movements are providing opposition to the dominant regime – has become a new defining moment for the twenty-first century rural sociological enterprise and, as such, is creating a vibrant and rich global network of scholars who are progressing this agenda. Indeed, the volume and sophistication of the work is impressive and potentially transformatory in a paradigmatic sense: an argument hotly contested, but one which is important to portray and progress (see Van der Ploeg and Marsden, 2008). In contributing to this ‘rebuilding’ exercise through the lens of agri-food, the article aims to support this paradigmatic shift in three ways. First it will be argued that, at this particular juncture of the now well-documented crisis in the conventional regime of agri-food, we have to theoretically and conceptually readdress the complex distinctiveness of agri-food as a set of important ‘third nature’ arrangements, Terry Marsden is Director of the Sustainable Places Research Institute (PLACE), Cardiff University, and Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning, Cardiff University, 51 Park Place, Cardiff, CF10 3AT, UK; email: . Int. Jrnl. of Soc. of Agr. & Food, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 257–274 ISSN: 0798-1759 This journal is blind refereed.