Crisis, cities, and cuisine: urban governance for gastronomic sector recovery in Porto and João Pessoa

Urban crises often render visible the socio-spatial inequalities and governance arrangements that structure everyday urban life. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a critical lens through which to examine how resilience is not merely an emergent capacity but a politically mediated and spatially differentiated outcome. This article analyses how urban governance, spatial infrastructures, and digital inequalities shaped the resilience of the gastronomic sector during the pandemic in Porto (Portugal) and João Pessoa (Brazil).

Drawing on a mixed-methods comparative design – including surveys with workers and consumers, semi-structured interviews, spatial analysis, and policy review – the study examines how governance responses interacted with urban morphology, public-space accessibility, informality, and digital readiness to produce divergent adaptive trajectories. The findings show that Porto’s coordinated cross-sector governance, compact urban form, and higher institutional and digital capacity enabled rapid spatial reconfiguration, flexible licensing, and the retention of adaptive practices. In contrast, João Pessoa’s fragmented governance arrangements, infrastructural deficits in peripheral areas, and high levels of informality constrained adaptation, limiting access to institutional support and reducing the effectiveness of digital strategies.

The article advances a relational comparative perspective by identifying three interdependent mechanisms shaping resilience outcomes: governance agility, understood as the capacity to coordinate and adapt across sectors and scales; spatial justice, reflected in the unequal distribution of adaptable public-space infrastructures; and institutional visibility, mediated by informality and digital divides. By conceptualising resilience as the product of interacting institutional, spatial, and socio-technical conditions, the study contributes to critical debates on urban governance, inequality, and crisis management beyond the specific context of the pandemic.