The work of foodification: an analysis of food gentrification in Turin, Italy

Abstract

Intersecting culinary and retail geographies, this paper brings to centre stage food in retail gentrification. Theoretically, it suggests that food, together with its spatialities, can produce a “displacement atmosphere” throughout retailscape by enabling privileged consumers to achieve distinction. Empirically, it draws from Porta Palazzo, Turin’s historical neighbourhood and marketplace, where the opening of a branded food hall reveals food’s role in the area’s early-stage retail gentrification. Attending to both the food hall and smaller emerging spatialities, the “work of foodification” is analyzed through three constitutive elements: discourse, materialities, practices. Within the city’s wider geographies and ongoing transformations, the synergy of these elements reveals that the work of foodification is the convert of Porta Palazzo into a device that, first, fixes a displacement atmosphere onto the local retailscape and, then, allows for the gentrification frontier to proceed. The paper responds to calls for re-conceptualizing displacement, contributing to emergent research on marketplaces as gentrification’s frontier spaces.