Justice
How gastrospaces distribute access to food, services, shared space, civic participation, and community life - and how they can reproduce exclusion, discrimination, and unequal power.
Philosophy · Space · Everyday life
Gastrospaces
A theory, a scalable framework, and a research programme for understanding food and space.
Every meal happens somewhere. That somewhere matters.
These places are more than settings. Public or private, formal or improvised, they shape how we eat - and how memory, identity, politics, culture, belonging, exclusion, and economic life take form.
01 / About
A shared framework for food and space.
Gastrospaces is a philosophical concept and a scalable framework for studying the spaces where eating takes place.
It brings analytic ontology and political philosophy into conversation with food studies, geography, architecture, design, data and mapping, and the social sciences.
This website brings together research, methods, cases, and materials related to Gastrospaces.
The aim is to build a shared language for understanding food and space and to connect philosophical research with mapping, policy, design, and practice.
Building a shared language - and a shared field - for thinking about food and space.
A theory · a scalable framework · a research programme
02 / Entry points
A vocabulary of place and eating.
Six provisional ways into the social, material, political, cultural, economic, and atmospheric life of gastrospaces. They are entry points, not a closed taxonomy.
Commensality
The relations created by eating together, from intimacy and conviviality to civic belonging.
Public Space
The politics of shared tables, streets, markets, institutions, and informal gathering.
Home
Domestic arrangements as sites of care, routine, labour, memory, and unequal power.
Culture & Economy
How gastrospaces act as gateways into cultures and as drivers of local and global economies, shaping taste, traditions, mobility, and community life.
Atmosphere
The sensory and affective qualities through which a place becomes inviting, alienating, familiar, or meaningful.
03 / Systems & mapping
From places to systems.
Gastrospaces rarely stand alone. They connect through people, practices, infrastructures, institutions, commodities, images, and data.
The framework is scalable.
It can be applied to a table, a building, a neighbourhood, a city, a region, or a transnational network. Individual places can be studied on their own or as parts of larger gastrospace systems.
Each project can select and combine the data appropriate to its question - qualitative, spatial, social, economic, sensory, cultural, political, or environmental.
One vocabulary, different datasets. One framework, different purposes.
Map relations
Actors, practices, flows, thresholds, ownership, institutions, and infrastructures.
Assemble data
Spatial, social, economic, sensory, cultural, political, and environmental evidence.
Support action
Research, policy, planning, design, management, and community initiatives.
04 / The book
Gastrospaces
A Philosophical Study of Where We Eat
The book develops a systematic philosophical framework for understanding the spaces where eating takes place. Combining analytic political philosophy and ontology, it examines gastrospaces as sites of social interaction, justice and injustice, cultural identity, and everyday life. Through examples ranging from domestic kitchens to restaurants, schools, markets, and public spaces, it offers both a conceptual framework and a practical toolbox for scholars, policymakers, designers, and practitioners.
View at Routledge05 / Research & resources
A curated field of inquiry.
This section brings together core texts, related scholarship, and methods and cases that help develop and apply the gastrospaces approach.
Core texts
The book and papers that develop the concept and its philosophical foundations.
Related scholarship
Selected work on food, space, justice, culture, design, geography, and everyday life.
Methods & cases
Mapping projects, datasets, ontologies, field studies, and policy or design tools.
From the Gastrospaces project
2023
The Justice and Ontology of Gastrospaces
Ethical Theory and Moral Practice
Bonotti · Borghini · Piras · Serini 2022 Learning from COVID-19: Public Justification and the Ontology of Everyday Life Social Theory and Practice
Bonotti · Borghini · Piras · Serini 2022 Eating Local: A Philosophical Toolbox The Philosophical Quarterly
Borghini · Piras · Serini 2022 Cooking and Dining as Forms of Public Art Food, Culture & Society
Borghini · Baldini
Bonotti · Borghini · Piras · Serini 2022 Learning from COVID-19: Public Justification and the Ontology of Everyday Life Social Theory and Practice
Bonotti · Borghini · Piras · Serini 2022 Eating Local: A Philosophical Toolbox The Philosophical Quarterly
Borghini · Piras · Serini 2022 Cooking and Dining as Forms of Public Art Food, Culture & Society
Borghini · Baldini
06 / Gallery
A growing visual, public, and field archive.
Maps, field observations, talks, workshops, public events, and images of gastrospaces.
Towards a shared language of where we eat.
Content management & curation
Andrea Borghini · Nicola Piras · Beatrice Serini
Research, resources, and materials are selected and organized by the content managers.
The Routledge volume
Matteo Bonotti · Andrea Borghini · Nicola Piras · Beatrice Serini
Andrea Borghini · Nicola Piras · Beatrice Serini
Research, resources, and materials are selected and organized by the content managers.
The Routledge volume
Matteo Bonotti · Andrea Borghini · Nicola Piras · Beatrice Serini