Research on urban food security has been concerned with urban systems of acquisition and production, with an emphasis on the informal sector and more recently on urban agriculture. Much less attention has been paid to linkages and food chains between rural and urban areas and their embededness in systems of migrancy. Namibia provides the case study for the research, and examines the prevalence of these urban-rural linkages, their dynamics, and their current or potential contribution to improving urban food security for poor, urban households. This research considers these questions of linkages within the broader context of urban food security.Firstly, the data show that in the case of Namibia where urban and rural links are strong, it is the resources associated with these connections that dominate urban households copign strategies, rather than the intra-urban household relationships suggested by the current literature on urban livelihoods amongst the poor. The research has thus helped to address a gap in the current theory regarding urban survival by demonstrating the important role played by food transfers from rural households to urban households, as part of teh migration process.Secondly, the findings have reinforced the importance of demographic coping strategies for both rural and urban household in the survival equation, evidenced through the social links and attendant reciprocal movement of children and adults between rural and urban households. Thirdly, the research suggests that it is no longer appropriate within the Namibian context to conceptualise the rural-urban migratio as a unilinear process. Rather, the evidence is that a form of urbanization that reflects complex demographic, social and commodity exchanges, based on reciprocity, is entrenching itself as the modus operandi of the Namibian social economy. Fourthly, the research contributes to the methodological debate regarding the measurement of domestic fluidity at the household level, and illustrates how the combination of quantitative and qualitative measures can help to provide a meaningful capture of domestic processes evident across geographic space and time.