Action for Education, Spatial Organisation and Planning for Sustainable Food

A reform for the whole food system is urgent. Bringing together various sectoral policies that affect food production, processing, distribution, and consumption, and refocusing all actions on transition to sustainability. There are serious gaps in knowledge and transformative competences to address the challenges in a multi-disciplinary way. Food charters, food strategies, and food policy councils have multiplied, ‘alternative food networks’ have gained significant shares of the food market and new forms of (re)localisation of food production are gaining ground for new food policy strategies. Planning sustainable food production, food resilience, justice and security is more than ever urging us to look for more effective, equitable, and just approaches that radically change the way we grow food at the very core of our living space. Graduates of (spatial) planning courses, NGO staff and other actors and stakeholders need to fulfil an essential role in developing integrated territorial plans in a democratic way, and for this, they need to be able to take an inter-sectoral, multi-level, and multi-stakeholder approach. The AESOP4Food project supports teaching, learning, capacity building and exchange of knowledge for this.

Firstly, to create a joint interdisciplinary learning activity on sustainable food planning for both students and teachers. Secondly, to develop the discussion within academia and the planning professions on the need for sustainable food systems. We aim to link expert and local knowledge which not only helps to inform better decisions but also ensures plans and policies which are both grounded in state-of-the-art knowledge and local communities’ perceptions. The partnership between academic institutes with civil society and local authorities is supported by the Participatory Action Research nature of the project and the connected living labs. Thirdly, to collect and disseminate evidence of good practice in higher education by providing an inclusive open access course that makes use of digital environments and web-based collaboration that also is available for adult learners and learners with fewer opportunities. The primary target groups are university staff and students. Secondly, volunteers and local authorities officers involved in planning, NGOs, and communities that are active in sustainable food planning. The project relates to food governance (food councils) and policies, land management, and agroecological urbanism

CONCRETE OUTPUTS are: (a) online interactive open-access course, with resources on an open-access wiki. (b) a Teacher's Guidance for capacity building with a set of 5 modules in the form of elaborated ECTS fiches, (c) a report on the intensive workshop in Madrid (d) 3 reports on our work on building blocks of an agroecological urbanism, for guidance on agroecological parks, access to land, and land management. Online course with resources The online course was piloted three times and resulted in a wiki with open access resources for learning and teaching. Teachers’ guidance The report has the following chapters: (1) What is the aim of AESOP4Food?, (2) Who can benefit from the course material? (3) What is the course about? (4) How to organise a transdisciplinary food planning course? (5) What is our learning and knowledge development approach? (6)How to link a living lab to learning and teaching? (7) The cases of the AESOP4food living labs (8) What tools, methods and platforms can be used? (9) How to organise collaborative monitoring and evaluation and peer review? Annex A. Phases of Living Labs; Annex B. Five module descriptions; Annex C. Example of an integrated module at Vilnius Tech; Annex D. selected KPIs for city region food system planning. Additional concrete outputs For further developing the building blocks of agroecological urbanism, a set of reports and a video have been prepared. A. A report on the Intensive Programme in Madrid, 2022, Regenerating urban food planning for eco-social transitions, edited by Universidad Politecnica de Madrid. B. A new model for agroecological parks, with a chapter on guidance to plan these parks, edited by the LE:NOTRE Institute. C. A report on Gentse Gronden about access to land, using public land as an instrument of leverage, edited by Universiteit Gent. D. Land protection, a French case study on land regulations and preserving agricultural land, edited by Terres en Ville. E. Instruction video of the MOST Farm in Warsaw, an example of bottom-up development of a collaborative farm and a future Territorial Food Hub. All concrete outputs will be publicly available online. OTHER RESULTS In addition to this the project partners produced the following results. Within the living lab hosted by the Stadsacademie Ghent University worked in varying formats and capacities on the question of publicly owned farmland, and more in particular the land owned by the Public commission for social welfare of the city of Ghent. As a result of this trajectory with support of the AESOP4FOOD project a publication in Dutch was produced with echoes of the debates and contributions of some of the participants. Universidad Politecnica de Madrid organised together with the Red de Municipios por la Agroecología organised an online International Seminar “Placing the food system within planetary limits. Advances and challenges for urban and land use planning”. Innovative initiatives from social actors and public bodies were explained as well as their connection to the innovative educational approach of AESOP4Food. The Seminar will result in a book that will be published in 2025. The UPM team, together with the Spanish National Research Center (CSIC) prepared a Master on Sustainable Food Planning (60ECTS, https://master-planeamientoagroecologico.eu/). It was approved by the UPM rectorate and will be launched in 2025. The AESOP4Food program made it possible for the UPM team to work in the development of curriculum material. This implies a publication with the Intensive Program July 2024 (Regenerative urban food planning for eco-social transitions) and another one which is in progress, with learning material about integrating food production, distribution and accessibility in urban planning. Warsaw University of Life Sciences and Commons Lab Foundation established in 2024 the cooperative farm MOST in Warsaw, as part of the Warsaw Living Lab. An instruction film about the MOST cooperative farm targeted at the residents of Warsaw. Participation in the AESOP4Food project also helped to increase the competence and involvement of the Warsaw community in the topic of food planning, which translated into the development of new research and lobbying projects. Terres en Ville and Supagro Montpellier further explored the aspect of land management which relates to one of the building blocks of an Agroecological Urbanism is Farming the Fragmented land. TEV researched in collaboration with SAFER, the French Public body that improves and maintains land structures by agricultural or forestry activities and rearranges plots .