FOOD URBANISM
TOIDU URBANISM EESTIS
LOCAL FOOD SYSTEMS PLANNING & DESIGN
The role of intersectoral cooperation in creating sustainable urban landscapes
In the era of climate change cities are facing numerous challenges related to adaptation. In this context, it is very important to create common urban spaces and ensure that cities become greener, and thus more citizen-friendly.
When designing urban greenery, it is important to take into account three basic paths: cooperation between city departments and units, cooperation with business, and active involvement of residents in activities for the benefit of greenery.
The exchange of knowledge and experience between stakeholders from different cities helps to improve the quality of urban greenery management. Cooperation with the business sector makes it possible to develop ways of involving its representatives in the active protection of urban greenery, including new forms of financing and arranging green areas.
Finally, involving residents in creating urban greenery at every stage (from design consultations, to planting and management) is another key aspect in creating a shared, sustainable urban landscape. The joint work on the development of urban spaces reduces communication barriers between local authorities and residents and increases the inhabitants’ knowledge of about the city's capabilities and organisational structure.
Andre Viljoen
University of Brighton
Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) research
Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs) and the CPUL City. An introduction to the design research and practice underlying these concepts.
Historically the city and agriculture have been seen as places apart. In this presentation the case will be made that architecture and agriculture could better co-exist in a new relationship that recognises their interdependencies and potential for creating more desirable, sustainable and comprehensible environments. Presenting Bohn&Viljoen Architect’s concept for “Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs)”, the presentation will introduce the rationale underlying the concept, referencing and reflecting upon a body of design led research. During the past 20 years environmental impact assessments, design propositions, installations, prototypes, field work, exhibitions, and publications have been used to advance and test CPUL ideas. In 2010 this research informed the United Nations University’s Institute of Advanced studies thinking about design strategies that could enhance urban biodiversity and in 2015 the work won Bohn and Viljoen the international Royal Institute of British Architects President’s award for outstanding university located research. Andre Viljoen will reflect on current issues supporting and hindering the widespread adoption of CPUL City and Food Urbanism strategies.
Linking older and newer gardeners
There is plenty of private gardening space in and around cities that is left unused due to the owner's age-related energy or time shortage. Many young people are living in apartments without any gardening space of their own. Pairing these people and their resources can lead to positive social cooperation and benefits for all involved. This is being done in Lithuania through the garden sharing initiative CoolŪkis where people who want to share their land are connected with those seeking to find gardening space.
Avo Rosenvald
MTÜ Tartu Maheaed - NGO
https://tootsipeenar.wordpress.com/
Tartu Organic gardening NGO and Tartu Urban gardening forum introduction
The NGO Tartu Organic Gardening (MTÜ Tartu Maheaed) was established in September 2011. SInce then the NGO has contributed to rejuvenating the declining tradition of allotment gardening. Our purpose first and foremost, is to grow our own food, but also to relax, to do outdoor activities, to use creativity to design our own garden, to spend free time with family, to offer work education to children, to be active in community and to celebrate organic gardening which is a healthy choice for both people and the environment.
The NGO’s actions and growing membership has highlighted the many values of organic gardening to the city and local government. To improve the city environment by addressing the legal and bureaucratic conditions to urban garden practice, MTÜ Maheaed formed the Tartu Urban Gardening Forum. Last year this working group of organisations and citizens managed to work with the local governance to add an ‘urban gardening’ function to the city’s spatial planning.
The future goals and directions of these two grassroot movements will be addressed, and their role in Tartu’s future city environment.
Caroline Moinel
Aalto University, School of Arts, Design and Architecture
NGO Dodo ry http://dodo.org/english/
Creating opportunities for urban agriculture in Helsinki. How can architects engage?
Urban agriculture has reemerged in developed cities over the last fifteen years in a variety of forms and scales, empowering people to access local and healthy food, while creating a sense of place and community. This also reflects an ongoing participatory urban culture movement and the redefinition of public urban spaces and urban life.
The case study of Helsinki illustrates that urban agriculture needs to be perceived as a practice with versatile activities, actors and motives, which unfolds through time. Urban agriculture remains currently vulnerable in Helsinki as many practices are temporary or rely on voluntary community effort. Therefore, the challenges of integrating it on a larger-scale will require a holistic approach: an interdisciplinary participation between professions and multiple efforts from top-down and bottom up initiatives. Architects can contribute as facilitators in the discourse. They can have different roles: as initiators when creating favourable conditions for a practice to start and operate, as mediators between practitioners, authorities and citizens, as well as curators or advisors supporting urban agriculture practices.
Darya Hirsch
Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences,
International Centre for Sustainable Development (IZNE)
Case study from Cologne-Bonn region- Towards sustainable urban food systems.
Among German cities, Cologne can be seen as a forerunner in the development of a new urban food policy. Indications for this include the city joining the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact in 2015, the establishment of a Food Policy Council in 2016 as well as the decision of the city council to transform Cologne into an edible city in 2017.
The municipality of Cologne together with the Food Policy Council have made great efforts, using participatory processes, to build a vision for a sustainable and regional food supply. A variety of multi-stakeholder activities related to the future urban food systems have taken place in Cologne over the last two years. Many different projects such as the edible city, regional direct marketing, sustainable communal catering of schools and kindergartens as well as regional gastronomy and artisanal food production were embarked upon.
Nevertheless, little attempt has been made to gain a bundled multi-stakeholder picture of the design of a sustainable future food system. This contribution presents experiences from two German Cities (Bonn and Cologne) addressing role of food policy and planning in both cities, describing relevant actors within the local food planning and policy activities as well as ways of shaping the food system by these actors.
Emil Rutiku
Estonian Food Network OTT http://www.eestiott.ee/
The Estonian OTT Network
This network is a direct grower to consumer model for food purchase. Eesti OTT now includes 20 meeting places and was initiated following the long running AMAP example in France. This model saves the producer and the consumer time, allows them both to share the risks whilst establishing a strong trust through weekly meetings.
Estonian language video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3pRMRj6XIL8
Izabella Mier
University of Warsaw Botanic Garden
Big questions engaging the public with responsible research and innovation on food security
Designing Botanic Gardens
The role of Botanic Gardens in cities is changing and growing: many of these institutions focused on research and preservation are developing their own interactive education centres organising events and open to the public. This presentation strives to answer the questions: what role should Botanic Gardens play to grow urban sustainability and how can Botanic Gardens build their education programmes to raise awareness on food security and sovereignty?
The Big Picnic project unites Botanic Gardens in Europe and Africa in reaching out to new audiences and engaging in the debate on food in urban and rural contexts. This presentation will introduce the role of Botanic Gardens in the city, then present the Big Picnic project and its tools: Team-Based Inquiry, Co-creation tools, Science Cafes, Evaluation and gathering RRI data. Finally I will discuss how the project's activities have proved transformative for our garden.
Izabela Myszka
Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Landscape Art Department
Hortitherapy in the city landscape - Warsaw perspective
Hortitherapeutic gardens are gardens created near health-centers supporting people with various types of disease or dysfunction. Therefore the design of these spaces should be based on the interdisciplinary cooperation of designers, therapists and patients.
The form and function of a garden must be programmed in a special way, in accordance to the specific abilities or diseases of its users, always in direct relation to the therapeutic program.
One of the most important aspects or activities connected with hortitherapy gardening is the necessity of including work with the land, with regularity as well as observation of plants growing cycle. The important culmination is the collection of fruits as the result of the labour input. Hortitherapy used for supporting treatment of neurological and psychiatric disorders always refers to the necessity of the patient undertaking work.
In both my practice and during my research I have met many therapists in agreeance that a properly designed vegetable garden supports therapy whilst enabling the production of healthy food. It gives people living with disability a sense of agency.
Jaanus Joasoo
Ministry of Rural Affairs
Estonian support measures for local food distribution networks
Local food networks have been growing rapidly in numbers over the last few years in Estonia. In every major city you can almost definitely find at least one local food network or farm shop that specialises on selling food products from local farmers. One of the main reasons for this development is that our consumers have become more interested and informed about how their eating habits affect their health and the environment they live in.
All these networks have been started by the people who have invested considerable amount of their own free time and resources into developing these opportunities. To help this trend continue to grow, there are also some support measures funded by the government and European Union that can help the development of local food networks. For example, it is possible to get support to open a farm shop or for marketing campaign that gives consumers information about locally produced agricultural products.
Jaanus Välja
Step up
Jaanus Välja - environmentally conscious hobby farmer, promoter of responsible lifestyle, fair trade expert and founder of STEP UP shop.I got interested in relationship between consumption and responsibility over 15 years ago. Since then, I've done some public awerness raising, now I run a fair trade shop with my family. Growing our own food is a natural way of life for our family. We a also pleased to offer our vegetables at the food society of Tartu.
Jeroen de Vries
LE:NOTRE Institute;
DG Groep; Van Hall Larenstein University of Applied Science
Research by designing for sustainable urban food production
There is a need for a sustainable food supply with a stronger involvement of the urban consumer with food, and resulting from this a meaningful, varied and accessible landscape. This will provide healthy food and is in line with the change of seasons, local circumstances, urban climate and a fair price. By making explorative designs this practice-led research by designing shows that cities can provide for a large part in their own food and at the same time develop attractive and multi-functional foodscapes. These foodscapes consist of a wide range of production types, such as urban farms, market gardens, food forests, fish farms, green-infrastructure farms but also kitchen gardens, roof gardens, aquaponics, orchards, and community gardens. The design solutions indicate how food production can integrally serve social, ecological and economic goals. Special attention is paid to meeting the quality criteria of research by designing.
Since 2014 the professorship for the design of sustainable foodscapes in urban regions of Van Hall Larenstein developed a research agenda which was mainly carried out by student projects. A selection of projects and research proposals will be presented, for instance the development of urban open space for fruit production and forest gardening.
Lilian Pungas
Institute for Political Ecology
“Dacha resilience” as an answer to the metabolic rift on an ecological, social and individual scale - the case of Food Self-Provisioning (FSP) in Estonia
In times of increasing concerns about overstepped planetary boundaries, widescale environmental degradation and ecological commodification there is an urgent need to explore alternatives to the contemporary capitalist models of production and consumption. Since agriculture is not only an essential nexus between society and nature but also – as Marx already warned a century ago - a possible threat to the fragile ecological balance in the current industrial form, this article explores how a potential alternative to the conventional agrifood system – Food Self- Provisioning (FSP) in (semi-)urban spaces – can mend the metabolic rift (Marx, 1981; Foster, 1999).
Using McClintock’s (2010) three-dimensional framework of metabolic rift that consists of ecological, social and individual dimension, and drawing from our fieldwork in Estonia, we demonstrate how FSP contributes to the de- commodification of fictitious commodities such as land, labour and food. The region-specific post-socialist FSP practice, characterized as “silent sustainability” by Jehlička and Smith (2013) serves as an example of sufficiency economy by re-connecting people to places, giving them back the self-efficacy about their livelihoods and de- alienating them from nature as well as from the (fruits of) their labour.
Maciej Łepkowski
Commons Lab Foundation
Warsaw University of Life Sciences, Landscape Art Department
The development of community gardening in Warsaw
Community gardening in Warsaw has been functioning for less than 10 years. During this time it has gone through several stages of development. From temporary installations implemented by artists and advertising agencies, through the emergence of pioneering gardens to the municipal program supporting garden initiatives. Today, community gardens want to set up schools, hospitals, social welfare homes, housing communities, etc. (not to mention private companies). As a Commons Lab Foundation, we actively accompanied these processes, including creation of the Hoe and Sun community garden, Urban Gardeners School and co creation of municipal supporting program Lush Warsaw.
I will talk about how community gardening gained popularity in Warsaw, what strategies were used and what are the prospects for the future. I also address the issue of food production and food sovereignty in the context of community gardening and its relations to allotment gardens.
The importance of urban meadows
Mart Meriste is a biologist, who has spent 80% of his life in the countryside, observing nature and thinking about ways of safeguarding and increasing biodiversity. Six years ago, he started a spin-off company of University of Tartu – Nordic Botanical. Company focuses on spreading ecological knowledge, but also carries out many hands-on activities, such as relocation of rare species or collection of seeds from nature for designing more biodiverse landscapes and urban areas. Mart believes that for combating biodiversity loss, we need to take use of areas that are not usually considered during nature conservation. Species rich meadows have been part of human establishments throughout history. Now, as most people live in cities, historical meadows are gone – they have been converted to cropland or they have just overgrown with shrubs and trees – and instead of biodiverse flowery meadows, people in the city are surrounded by species poor parks, lawns and stony streets. It is time to bring biodiversity back to people in the form of “city meadows”, and at the same time provide refugia for species who cannot tolerate intensive agriculture and forestry in the landscape surrounding the city.
Let’s bring meadows close to people again!
Miguel Villoslada
Landscape Management and Nature Protection Department
Estonian University of Life Sciences
A multi-functional perspective of urban green networks
Urban food production systems are an integral part of larger networks of green spaces in the urban environment. These green networks encompass a great spatial diversity and ecological heterogeneity resulting from the coupled human and natural system. The particularities of urban ecosystems’ structure and functions arise from the complex interactions between urban dynamics and ecological processes, leading to a patchy mosaic of different habitats. The spatial configuration, nature and structure of these green patches determine their function and the benefits they provide (carbon sequestration, heat mitigation, flood regulation and pollination among others). Much like in rural or wilder environments, linear habitats in the cities act as wildlife corridors, and it is not unusual to find biodiversity hotspots containing rare and endangered species at the core of urban areas.
Only by adequately identifying, characterizing and accounting for the structural complexity of these functions, we are able to design and manage coherent and resilient urban green networks. Only by understanding the dynamics and inter-connections between these green structures, we are able to recognize their value.
The rapid increase in geospatial data availability and quality allows for the development of frameworks that incorporate a more functional approach into green network planning.
Arranging and linking – analysis of selected attempts to restructure food supply chains
Theoretical discussions on food have illustrated that any changes in supply chains should be seen in the light of systemic complexity. Processes observed within food systems are mutually interrelated as well as tied to a diverse spectre of contextual factors. For specific values to penetrate food system, there needs to be an arrangement of practices that allow maintaining these values across networks of actors operating in a food supply chain. However, for these values to prevail the created arrangements need to be linked to contexts holding means to legitimize and empower these values. Thus for the change to take place, it must enable nodes that can maintain its focus also while re-inventing ties linking it to the surrounding reality.
The paper uses five examples to illustrate (1) attempts to re-arrange food system actors to introduce new values in the supply chain and (2) linkages created to tie created networks of practices to contexts. Two of the selected cases illustrate school meal organisation, two cases present farmers markets and one represents consumer-led direct buying group. All of these cases initially were trying to introduce locality, environmental awareness and high nutritional value as driving force guiding food supply chain. Their success has been strongly related to their ability to empower and legitimize these attempts in the broader context.
Community shops -way to organise environmentally sustainable and socially responsible food supply chain. Case of "Dobrze" Food Cooperative in Warsaw.
Community shops -way to organise environmentally sustainable and socially responsible food supply chain. Case study of "Dobrze" Food Cooperative in Warsaw. Organic food sourced locally, domestic fair trade, workers rights, non-hierarchical structure, 2 shops and over 250 active members. Short story of a social enterprise in Warsaw.
Rea Raus
Educator and expert in sustainable development - Tampere University
Organic food as contributing to wellbeing, an ecological balance of communities- aspects for community learning. Informal sustainability education and social media education
The importance of organic food is a widely discussed topic, in the context of our health and well-being. However awareness alone does not necessarily create change in our behaviour and actions to contribute to increased growing and consumption of organic food. What are the deeper mechanisms that support such a change? How to use an holistic approach to learning in different dimensions of transformation towards more sustainable communities? How is the prosperity of a community, the health and wellbeing of a person, learning and sustainability interconnected? These questions are addressed through the example of bees and producing honey in both urban and rural communities.
Roberto Diolaiti
Environment and Energy Department of the Municipality of Bologna
The history of the rural landscape of Bologna
From Roman's urban development planning to FICo (Fabbrica Italiana Contadina)
An overview on the changes of the countryside of Bologna, from the roman planning to the exhibition of the production of high quality food, through the evolution of the landscape: from intensive to extensive cultivation, from the agricultural forest to plants simplification (semplificazione vegetale), to the peri-urban agriculture and horticulture in the city (Bologna city of gardens).
The presentation aims to show how, over the last 2,000 years, the area of the city of Bologna has progressively changed, while maintaining a rural vocation, through landscape simplifications and a progressive transfer of some crops within the city.
It is then moved from the alleged "planted landscapes (paesaggi della piantata)", survived through the centuries up to the middle of the last century, to extensive field cultivations (coltivazioni di pieno campo estensive), which have maximised the production and simplified the countryside. A trend that has been changing over the last decade, with a return to quality products, reconstruction of lost rural areas and a new sensibility.
A new knowledge that is at the base of Fabbrica Italiana Contadina, opened in 2017 on the outskirts of Bologna. A place to taste and buy agro-industrial products from all over Italy, where it is possible to observe the reconstructions of agricultural environments, livestock and take part to several initiatives dedicated to food culture, agriculture and awareness on limiting waste.
Roxana Triboi
Urban planner
PhD candidate “Ion Mincu” University of Architecture and Urban Planning
Urban pastoralism, an environmental and cultural productive practice, as important component of sustainable food systems
The pastoralism represents a pattern of subsistence, even today, in an increasingly urbanized environment.
In Romania, in the last years, due to a combination of factors like chaotic fragmentation of the periphery, development and urban gaps or waste land, the abandonment of agricultural exploitation of arable land, pastures developed and prospered mostly in the green pockets of urban peripheries and therefore the urban pastoralism represents the most important expression of city-agriculture interaction in this geographical region. The cultural aspect of this practice is a significant component of this activity that should be carefully considered. The phenomenon can be observed also in neighbouring countries in the Balkans.
The lack of recognition by residents and authorities due to the general negative perception of this practice next to the urban residential areas and also other factors put pressure on this fragile phenomenon.
While traditionally understood as a rural phenomenon, the pastoralism values both the social, economic, ecological and agricultural dimensions of urban territories and with appropriate recognition and management can be transformed into an important tool for sustainable urban planning especially in terms of organizing food systems.
Sophia E. Hagolani-Albov
University of Helsinki
Stories from the garden plot: Helsinki urban agriculture
Sophia Hagolani-Albov is a doctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki in the agroecology group. She has lived and worked primarily in Finland for the last five years. Her research addresses sustainable countryside agricultural change and the form, function, and use of urban agricultural space and place. Sophia is a social scientist and geographer utilising primarily qualitative methods to investigate her research topics. She has interacted with urban agriculture as a researcher, consumer, and participant.
In this presentation, Sophia will delve into the points of interaction between people and the agricultural landscapes developed within the broader urban landscape. She will bring stories from the crux of the concrete jungle and the secret garden. Her experiences in the municipal and experimental spaces of Helsinki’s urban gardens serve as the inspiration for this exploration.