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Record W4408756212 · doi:10.1080/13549839.2025.2477016

Why do (some) people in informal settlements in Latin America grow food today and what is their struggle?

2025· article· en· W4408756212 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueLocal Environment · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldAgricultural and Biological Sciences
TopicUrban Agriculture and Sustainability
Canadian institutionsMcGill UniversityConcordia UniversityUniversité de Montréal
FundersInternational Development Research Centre
KeywordsInformal settlementsLatin AmericansHuman settlementPolitical scienceFood insecurityDevelopment economicsGeographyEconomic growthFood securityEconomicsAgricultureArchaeology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

For many years, researchers have debated whether urban and peri-urban Agriculture is a means to reach food security and alleviate poverty in the Global South. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic, supply chain disruptions, and climate change impacts have fuelled optimism about the benefits of alternative food systems. Yet previous studies have shown that people who engage in alternative food systems often do it as part of a larger struggle and are not always seeking to solve food needs per se. Why are people in informal settlements in Latin America and the Caribbean engaging in alternative food systems and what is exactly their struggle? This study in low-income settlements in Colombia, Chile, Cuba, and Ecuador confirms that adult women and the elderly engage in alternative food systems for a variety reason that go beyond food. Common reasons include education, socialisation, environmental protection, leisure, crime reduction, maintaining cultural traditions, and dealing with psychological distress and isolation. The struggles within which these activities emerge take different forms and respond to specific local conditions. Involvement in food becomes a way of transforming space and expressing normative principles through collective action. But it is also a way of reifying values, (re)positioning individual identities and explore people’s experiences. From a theoretical viewpoint, these results show that to fully grasp the benefits of alternative food systems it is necessary to understand their spatial component and the specific forms of struggle that exist conditions of informality. Several tensions must be resolved in urban planning and food system projects.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Observational · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.714
Threshold uncertainty score0.352

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.171
Teacher spread0.166 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it