Europe’s urban areas face significant challenges to ensure the availability and consumption of healthy, affordable, safe and sustainably produced food. Such challenges converge within local food environments but are often neglected by public planners. Promising initiatives taken by municipalities to change the architecture of food choice often fail to become embedded in the wider policy context and to reach deprived and vulnerable groups. Key factors responsible for this are: (1) siloed ways of working and (2) fragmentation of knowledge on facilitators and barriers related to food system transformation. These factors hinder the development and implementation of integrated urban food policies.
All citizens should be able to fill their plate with nutritious, safe, sustainable and affordable food. However, Europe’s urban areas are struggling to ensure availability and consumption of healthy, sustainable food among deprived and vulnerable groups. With this in mind, a project defined in this space will lead to creating more sustainable urban food environments by building strong science–policy–practice interfaces (i.e. food policy networks) and experimenting with innovative approaches and business models in Living Labs. Activities will be supported by an innovative conceptual framework, which emphasises sustainability co-benefits, spatial linkages, social inclusion and sectoral connectivity.
The project will be linked to a large EU project called FOODCLIC which supports multi-stakeholder engagement, including deprived and vulnerable groups.
This project will conduct inventory studies re Living Lab activities, which may involve human data collection, processing of existing data and observation of participants in relation to sensory and consumer science.
The project is aligned to UN's SGD:
