The production of the rurbal space: Alternative food provisioning in Denmark

Over the last twenty years new spaces of food provision have emerged in yet more urban settings. In this chapter we explore these spaces as alternative urban food spaces to find out: (1) in what ways they can be said to be alternative; (2) how they are produced; and (3) why alternative food spaces are designated specifically as urban. The chapter suggests that alternative urban food spaces involve practices that usually relate to rural life. When performed in urban settings these practices merge and entangle the urban and rural in new ways, ways that are nevertheless known from past rural-urban relationships. With this as well as recent debates about rural-urban dynamics in mind, in particular the idea of the rural as the ‘constitutive outside’ (Roy, 2016), we suggest framing the new food provisioning spaces as rurbal. Thus, in addition to investigating the production of an alternative urban space, the chapter contributes to the debate about the rural-urban continuum. This debate has been a point of philosophical interest for more than a century, as exemplified for instance by Tarde (1903) on differences in imitation, Simmel (2002 [1903]) on differences in ways of knowing, Durkheim (1984 [1893]) on differences in the pivotal point of community, Tönnies (2001 [1887]) on differences in the formality of relations, and Lefebvre (2004 [1992]) on differences in rhythms.