Rupturing the mundane in times of crisis: New geographies of food in Hannover, Germany

In this chapter, we present images and self-drawn maps of food retail and consumption that we collected between April 2020 and April 2021 in Hannover and Verden, two cities located in northern Germany. As part of a larger collaborative auto-ethnographic collaboration, we took photos, wrote research vignettes and diaries and drew maps and sketches in our neighbourhoods, to document how our relation to our cities – and crucially to food within our cities – changed due to the Covid-19 pandemic and related public health measures. Perceiving food retailers like supermarkets, farmer markets and cafés as important social infrastructures, the pandemic disrupted the sociality of these places. What is more, the public health measures designed to curb the spread of the virus forced us to re-orient ourselves in our hometowns by introducing new spatial designs and altered spaces of food consumption. Yet, the pandemic equally triggered a wave of solidarity between café owners and consumers, thus highlighting how food and drinks connect us to each other and to our neighbourhoods. The practice of collecting, sharing and discussing images of the edible city in pandemic times, helped us reconnect with the estranged urban terrain and thus might be beneficial to readers to re-think and reconnect to their surroundings, too in these challenging times.