Battersby and colleagues dismantle the assumption that urban infrastructure is best understood as a stable grid to which populations are progressively connected. Their central contribution is the infrastructural assemblage: food security emerges through shifting combinations of material systems, social relations, informal economies, political arrangements and everyday improvisation. Access is consequently neither binary nor purely technical but a contested continuum shaped by location, identity, marginalisation and distributed agency. The methodological operation is relational rather than sectoral, bringing food systems into dialogue with urban political ecology and the infrastructural turn to expose dependencies that disciplinary silos obscure. Formal and informal, public and private, on-grid and off-grid mechanisms are read together as actual urban operating conditions. The wider bridge is to assemblage urbanism and critical infrastructure studies, where resilience depends less on ideal integration than on understanding how heterogeneous relations sustain everyday life and how inequalities are reproduced through apparently neutral systems of provision.
