Neighborhood Fare: Forefront Fellowship is a fellowship through the Urban Design Forum in partnership with the NYC Department of City Planning and the NYC Mayor's Office of Food Policy to understand the food infrastructure and food equity in New York City.

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by Nausher Khan, Diana Malone, Ezra Moser, Fernando Ortiz-Baez, Kelvin Taitt

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Our project focused on exploring different approaches to increase access to healthy and affordable food in neighborhoods characterized by otherwise expensive, unhealthy and limited choices. We focus on the centralization of food distribution as a source of this inequity, particularly amongst low-income, urban communities of color. We propose a neighborhood food hub as the best alternative to the current centralized model. 

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We began by rewriting the classic definition of a food hub. We identified four crucial aspects of a neighborhood food hub:

• Buys from small- and mid-sized Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) providers

• Stores and distributes food, either to other businesses or to consumers directly

• Sells affordable, prepared, nutritious, on-the-go food

• Provides services and facilities to strengthen entrepreneurship and build resilience in the community served

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We conceive of a successful neighborhood food hub as a decentralized collective of service providers aimed at addressing food equity, food access, affordability and availability by providing raw and finished food products, alongside food-related wraparound social services and economic empowerment.

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