Special Report - Sustainable Food in Urban Communities, Better food for better lives

For Stephanie Mantell, a project coordinator from Lead Partner Brussels, the horsemeat affair underlines the importance of the Sustainable Food project. "Consumers are concerned and feel misinformed," she says. "They seek food products and producers they can trust. This heightened interest and awareness about the origins of the food we eat is a window of opportunity to encourage a switch to more sustainable eating practices and boost shorter, more transparent supply chains."

Those are the aims of this ambitious two-year URBACT project, shared between ten partner cities. It will examine the environmental impact of food at all stages of the food chain; reduce levels of food waste and will address the way urban citizens have become disconnected from the food they eat, encouraging them to choose a diet of locally-grown, healthier produce, and if possible to be involved in its production.

A third of our food is wasted

The stakes are high, as figures produced by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation show: food represents over 30% of global energy demand and is responsible for over 20% of global greenhouse gases. Worldwide, about a third of all food produced for human consumption is wasted or lost during the process.

The project is divided into three main aspects:

• Growing, which includes facilitating cultivation in urban plots, farms and gardens
• Delivering, by examining the supply chain, reducing food miles and minimising the carbon footprint
• Enjoying, by teaching people about food preparation and healthy eating, appreciation of high-quality local produce.

The partner cities include a broad range of different situations and challenges. Aside from Lead Partner Brussels there are also Bristol (UK), Athens (Greece), Messina (Italy), Lyon (France), Gotenburg (Sweden), Oslo (Norway), Ourense (Spain), Vaslui (Romania) and Amersfoort (Netherlands).
Partners that are capital cities are densely populated and so have less scope for turning urban spaces over to cultivation. But in Athens some symbolic "green streets" are planned and in Oslo they are promoting "green roofs" as extra garden space, which also gives buildings better insulation, therefore reducing the carbon footprint. In Brussels they are introducing the idea of "edible parks", which have not just municipal flowerbeds but also crops to which citizens can help themselves.

Re-appropriating public spaces for food

"Clearly we are not going to strive to be self-sufficient in Brussels," Stephanie Mantell says.  "But it's not only about the quantities of food produced but also in terms of awareness. We are exploring the different roles of urban agriculture, not just production but also the symbolic re-appropriating of public spaces that are not otherwise used in a positive way."

Some of the cities have strong food traditions and the project seeks to reassert and strengthen those. Messina, for example, active in the Slow Food movement, wants to help fight its unemployment problem by training young people in the arts of Sicilian food specialities for new business start-ups in a planned University of Gastronomic Science.

Ourense hosts Galician gastronomy festivals and values its street markets but it has former agricultural land in surrounding villages lying abandoned, and the city wants to revitalise that. Lyon, too, is a gastronomic capital with 65 street markets. But it wants to extend that culture to underprivileged citizens.  

And Amersfoort, which was named as "Dutch Capital of Taste" last year, is very active on its food traditions and is receiving welcome support from the city authorities for bottom-up initiatives to change land use for cultivation.  

A generation who can no longer cook

In Bristol, by contrast, as in much of the UK, many citizens have lost touch with food culture to such an extent that a whole generation know longer knows how to cook, relying on supermarket ready meals or fast food, with worrying implications for public health such as the rise in obesity. The project coordinators there have identified "food deserts" in the city, areas where there is no fresh produce available, and want to improve all citizens’ access to sustainable food with a host of initiatives.

One partner that sets an excellent example to the others is Vaslui, identified as a food-resilient city in that it has retained its tradition of citizens tending their own food plots and preserving their food. So far just one big supermarket has opened in the town. "The URBACT project helps our Romanian partners to appreciate more what they already have," Stephanie says, "and to try if possible to preserve it. It also gives the other partners inspiration."

The Scandinavian partners Oslo and Gotenburg may have a much shorter growing season but they are champions of organic food. In its school meals provision, Gotenburg aims to have 50% of organic ingredients and 100% organic meat. When the partners attended a transnational meeting in Gotenburg at the end of May, they visited school canteens. "They managed to achieve that at a cost of only 1 euro per pupil per meal," Stephanie says. "It gives us inspiration to see that if you have these decisions at a political level, you can succeed in lowering costs, even for organic meals."

Reaching out to poorer families

A particular focus for this project in all the cities is low-income households, where families have fewer choices and are likely to have poorer diets. "In Brussels about a quarter of the population lives below the poverty line," Stephanie says, "so this is really a priority we will work on here – to reach them and include them."

There is some overlap between this project and URBACT Markets project and there has already been contact with that project's Lead Partner Barcelona.  Stephanie says: "We're trying to use this URBACT project to get a better overview of everything that's happening and get a more strategic integration of everything that’s happening."

The next steps

The transnational workshops are divided into the three themes: growing, delivering and enjoying. The next one will be on growing in Oslo 10-12 September.

In February 2014 Brussels will host the interim conference looking at the workshop results on all three themes. Then the second set of workshops next year will be: Growing, in Messina, in April; Delivering, in Lyon, in June; and Enjoying, in Vaslui in September.

Finally, in March 2015 Athens will host the final conference on all three themes.


Read more:

• Sustainable Food in Urban Communities - URBACT website
• Innovative Ways to Produce Food: Inspirations for The Dutch City of Amersfoort - URBACT Blog
• Food in Urban Communities blog - website