Sustainable Foodscapes
Co-creating a food environment where it is easy, safe and inviting to live sustainably
Food practices
Our social, material and institutional environments have a large impact on what food we can access, how we buy and consume food, how we get rid of (food)waste and how we socialize around food. This project aims to create a culture and environment where it is easy, safe and inviting to make sustainable choices.
Through ethnographic work we create a detailed understanding of the local food environment and how people experience and respond to this environment. This grounded understanding is the first step towards co-creating practice interventions that help build a more sustainable community.
Approach
Ethnography
Ethnographic work examines the entire context in which (un)sustainable practices take place. The depth and variety of data of (visual) ethnography matches the complexity of sustainability challenges, and allows for a better connection between climate policies and citizens' lived experience.
Surveys
Through the use surveys we gain a broader understanding of food practices. Combined with ethnographic work, mixed method research offers a broad yet localized understanding of food praactices and their continued evolvements.
Co-creation
Working together with citizens, municipalities and local food-related organisations, we set up real-life interventions into the foodscape, based on the knowlegde from the fieldwork and surveys. We use art-based methods to re-orient the understanding of household food practices and inform a sustainable design of the foodscape.
Theoretical framework
Using social practice theory with a new materialist lens, we look beyond individual responsibility, focusing on the practice instead of the actor. Adding a new materialist lens includes questions of power and justice into this framework. Through literature and desk research, we ground our work within the (academic) debate, in the fields of sustainability research, design anthropology and public administration.