Socio-spatial Analysis of Food Insecurity in an Urban Context: The Case of the City of Rome

The concept of food insecurity is a challenge of growing importance worldwide, even in the most developed countries. The need to measure it and understand how it manifests on the territory is critical to implementing targeted policies and programs to address it. This study aims to propose and test an Affordability Index to measure economic access to food at the territorial level, focusing on nutritional and environmental aspects. The index was applied to municipalities in the metropolitan city of Rome, and critical areas where access to healthy and sustainable food was found to be more problematic were identified. The spatial approach of this methodology allows for the implementation of specific “place-based” policies to improve access to healthy, quality food. It is important to note the multidimensional nature of this phenomenon and the need to use a range of additional tools capable of measuring both economic access and physical and social accessibility of food. Further research could focus on combining this indicator with methods that identify the different dimensions of access to healthy and quality food.