In this guest post, the team led by Prof Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo, Liliana Gaviria from Fundación Casa B, and Karol Viviana Cubillos Gutiérrez from Fundación Social CRECER present Open Kitchen: weaving protection and care for communities on the move, an Urban Urgencies project funded by the Urban Studies Foundation.
Starting on 1 October 2026, this 17-month Open Kitchen project aims to mitigate hunger and ensure adequate nutritional access for vulnerable residents and migrants in two neighbourhoods located in Bogotá, Colombia affected by structural poverty and informal labour. Migrants working in the informal sector, along with their children, as well as impoverished older adults will participate in a community kitchen experience that could provide them with food security and alleviate their situation of scarcity. By transforming vulnerability into leadership, we hope to rebuild confidence, amplify community agency and compel meaningful public policy responses.
Why is this project important?
Many people in cities in the Global South live in a permanent condition of uncertainty and improvisation with simultaneous and interconnected crises that impede them access to good quality food. Food lies at the heart of many aspects of life and fosters social connections. Improving it can have a positive impact on these other spheres of people’s lives. Community kitchens and gardens, for instance, provide opportunities for people to get involved and share experiences, knowledges, memories, and affects. We focus on food as an inalienable urban right that requires justice-oriented policies especially vital in the urban margins of the Global South.
This project will support people facing a multifaceted crisis every day, as they struggle to find the resources they need to survive and pay for daily accommodation and food for themselves and their children. Rather than simply providing food, our aim is to get to know more about their life stories, work experiences, and coping strategies. We rely on the expertise of two organisations that have long been present in both areas: CRECER has provided nursery care and seeks to promote healthy eating. Casa B runs a community kitchen, giving participants the opportunity to learn from experienced women how to manage a community kitchen and prepare healthy, high-quality, low-cost meals. Both organisations aim to build on participants’ existing skills and promote commensality and mutual learning.
Where
The project will take place in two neighbourhoods in central Bogotá, Colombia, which are close to each other and characterised by urban segregation, spatial violence, and gentrification. La Favorita, a former residential area in the 1940s and 1950s, has transitioned into an automotive parts hub and is now a hotspot for micro-trafficking (‘ollas’) and sexual exploitation. In contrast, the historic Colonia Belén neighbourhood is under immediate threat of displacement due to real estate speculation and gentrification.
Our team
Our team operates as a collaborative, transdisciplinary, and strategic alliance. We have been building this partnership with the two organisations since November 2025, when we engaged on the subject of urban violence and public action. Since then, we have cultivated a deep, trust-based synergy. As a transdisciplinary alliance, we promote collaboration by moving away from extractive research practices and proposing a horizontal and participatory research scheme.
The project director is Prof Andrés Salcedo Fidalgo, an anthropologist, professor at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and cofounder of the Grupo de Estudios Sociales de la Vida Urbana (GESVU). The project advisor is Dr Thierry Lulle, a geographer and professor at Universidad Externado de Colombia. Another team member is Juan Mateo Monroy Cardona, an anthropologist, legal assistant at The Lisinski Law Firm and member of the Grupo de Estudios Sociales de la Vida Urbana (GESVU). We will also have the support of one graduate and one undergraduate student.
Fundación Casa B, led by Nicolás Gori, is located in the Belén neighbourhood and will serve as our host organisation. They have worked for more than 10 years under the principle ‘Barrio cuida Barrio’ (Neighbourhood looking out for neighbourhood) and they provide the physical space and infrastructure for the project. This includes the El Dragón Library, which serves as a safe space for childcare, led by Cristina Silva Rodríguez, a librarian, educator, and volunteer community outreach worker. The ‘Aisha’ community kitchen is led by Liliana Gaviria, a community leader and educator.
Led by Esperanza Arévalo, Fundación Social CRECER has been present in the La Favorita neighbourhood for more than 20 years, providing daycare assistance to over 300 toddlers and mothers, including sex workers and families who have recently been displaced, in order to mitigate severe childhood malnutrition. Karol Viviana Cubillos Gutiérrez is a social worker and will be leading the project at CRECER.
Participants
The project will work and collaborate with various populations affected by overlapping crises. These include children of Venezuelan migrants, sex workers, displaced Embera indigenous families, informal workers, and abandoned older adults, all of whom struggle to access basic nutrition on a daily basis.
Most of the families we aim to support live in daily-rent housing (‘pagadiarios’) which has no basic kitchen facilities, forcing them to rely on highly processed food. Women are often forced into sex work, while men are pushed into ‘rebusque’ (precarious informal labour) just to survive. This leaves children exposed to dangerous situations and dependent on the shelters run by our partner organisations.
The project aims to connect mothers who send their children to the CRECER daycare centre in La Favorita with the women and elderly residents who benefit from Casa B in Belén. This will strengthen urban community bonds through agriculture and establish the Casa B Aisha community kitchen as a central space providing care and shelter.
Outputs
We invite scholars, urban political ecologists, health practitioners, and policymakers to follow our upcoming milestones. We welcome insights, methodological suggestions, and collaborative expertise to help strengthen our ongoing work:
- Socio-spatial and sensory mapping: this participatory, multisensory cartography registers people’s ‘urban drifts’ and tracks food flows, care networks, and trajectories of exclusion through the lens of aromas and flavours.
- Urban Garden Fieldwork: community leaders and migrant mothers will lead visits to local urban gardens, introducing participants to alternative food sources and validating alternative agricultural epistemologies.
- Collaborative kitchen workshops hosted at Casa B’s Aisha Kitchen will serve as a social laboratory for horizontal exchange, learning, and culinary innovation, as well as for building solidarity networks.
- Cookbook co-creation: a compilation of traditional recipes, both written and digital, that highlight the medicinal and nutritional properties of ingredients used to survive everyday urban emergencies.
Our final outputs will include:
- An interactive digital and offline map, created based on our multisensory cartography, will be distributed via mobile networks. It will be a useful tool for both residents and migrants, and it will provide educational and governmental institutions with a rigorous, community-generated instrument to understand the lived socio-ecological realities of these marginalised neighbourhoods.
- A cross-cultural printed cookbook, co-created by migrant women and community leaders. This physical book goes beyond traditional recipe collections by documenting food-centred survival strategies and validating alternative ways of knowing.
- A five-episode podcast series will convey the participants’ personal experiences in the project, sensory memories, and reflections directly to the public in the form of audio dispatches.
- A participatory documentary capturing the entire project process and centred on the voices, experiences and strategies of migrant women and older adults. It will work as a tool for community empowerment, raising awareness and reaching out to institutions.
- A public policy fanzine targeting government agencies in an accessible format, which aims to drive meaningful, justice-oriented policy responses in urban food governance based directly on the testimonies and lessons learned throughout the research.
A Call to Urban Scholars and Advocates
We want to connect with researchers, activists, and policymakers who work at the intersection of urban political ecology, food sovereignty, migration studies, urban emergency studies, and Global South urbanism, both worldwide and specifically in Colombia. We hope to design and share a replicable, resilient model for urban food justice that can inspire similar experiences elsewhere by demonstrating how urban community kitchens can function as vital infrastructures to strengthen community bonds, confront structural violence, and navigate overlapping urban emergencies.
Stay tuned! We will be sharing our progress, audio dispatches, and mapping insights right here.
For enquiries regarding upcoming workshop methodologies or collaborative opportunities, please reach out directly to Prof Andrés Salcedo, our partner organisations (Fundación Casa B and Fundación Social CRECER), or the Urban Studies Foundation network.