Vila Nova de Gaia

Well known for the production and commercialization of Porto Wine, Vila Nova de Gaia wants to enhance its peri-urban agricultural territories and agricultural activities by crafting new approaches to local food systems. The Municipality of Vila Nova de Gaia has shown a growing concern with the improvement of the urban environment and implementation of policies aimed at energy and environmental sustainability, promoting sustainable urban development and, simultaneously, improving the citizens’ life quality.

The municipality's priorities include the increase and improvement of services provided to the population by supporting and developing infrastructures and projects that can contribute to a more environmentally sustainable world, focused on differentiated approaches to improve the urban system and thus gradually move towards a circular economy model. Vila Nova de Gaia is already experimenting with municipal urban gardens, educational workshops open to the citizens and environmentally-led initiatives. At the same time, in recent years, Vila Nova de Gaia has beeing developing an action plan aiming the implementation of the Milian Urban Food.

Following this prupose, the municipality is involved in several projects that will help the city to define response strategies for urban development and one is the integration of urban agriculture into urban economy as an urban solution to improving urban environmental management, reduce urban  poverty, enhance urban food security and stimulating participatory city governance. In this context, multi-sector collaborations can foster the creation of sustainable rural-urban territories and food chains that can contribute to fostering resilient and economically prosperous food systems.

Vila Nova de Gaia ambition, is to realize an Investment Plan, together with its local community, as an integrated strategy to innovate its food system with new skills, ideas and pilot projects in order to reinforce the expertise on food and urban development, recognising the important role of rural and urban territories. They want to increase political and citizens’ awareness of the importance of peri-urban agricultural territories, in the quality of urban life, social inclusion and equity, poverty reduction, job creation and food security.

For this reason, the city aims to benefit from Next Agri project and to work hard in sinergy with the other partners, local partnership and experts involved in the project