Out living labs

Introduction to Living Labs

The Living Labs are part of a community learning model that brings the groups of actors in a community together, to form their landscape. The methods and tools learned in the Online Seminar will be able to be explored and tested in the Living Labs, by the group of students who are local to that community. Each partner university has created its own Living Lab and itinerary for lab meetings, which will run parallel with the Online Seminar. Some of the engagements with the Living Labs include -

Participatory Action Research - sessions including PAR will involve active methods for engaging the community in the lab and in the landscape, in order to gather data about their space.

CoDesign - students will work together with the community, bringing stakeholders in on key points of the design process, to increase the functionality and sustainability of the design.

Community Feedback - methods can be tested for gaining insightful critique from stakeholders, to understand the effectiveness of the design.

Madrid Living Lab

Barrios Productores Madrid. "Gardening food justice" Finding nexus between urban farming & right to food

Location In Madrid periphericlal neighbourhoods, in empty or misused plots that are part of the municipal Program Barrios Productores. The ‘Producer Districts’ project has more than 250 plots available, most of them located in the city's peripheral districts, with a wide diversity of urban landscapes. This competition proposes five sites with different typologies and sizes, which can serve as examples for analysis. We focus on those assigned for development in 2022-2023.

UNSDGs engaged in the Lab are: SDG2, SDG4, SDG8, SDG12

Local landscape challenges The combination of public urban voids together with the demand from agroecological social movement to provide resources to solidarity pantries (connected to a kind of community kitchen project).

Character of the lab The Barrios Productores (Producer Districts) project goal is to recover and regenerate urban voids in empty or misused plots through a strengthened dialogue between city and nature. It will integrate food production with the urban fabric. Urban gardens are designed with a complex program of uses capable of answering all the dimensions that the program seeks to embrace: social gathering, educational purposes, experimental ones, short-circuit food production, participating in the enhancement of environmental conditions and biodiversity, recycling, and efficient water use, reduction of the so-called “heat island” effect, the use and production of renewable energy, etc., without missing its landscape component, helping the social validation of the inhabited surroundings and actually producing new ecosystems, half-way between nature and culture. At the same time, the social movement "Madrid agroecologico" works together with self-managed solidarity pantries in emancipatory responses to food emergency. They request access to public resources and facilities to the processing of food surplus from periurban agroecological farms.

Sources: https://estrategiaurbana.madrid.es/barrios-productores/ https://www.europan-europe.eu/en/session/europan-16/site/madrid-es https://madridagroecologico.org/despensas-solidarias-y-agroecologia-embotar-para-generar-nuevas-logicas/

Ghent Living Lab

UGENT - FUTURE URBAN HERITAGE FOR AGROECOLOGICAL FARMING IN PERI-URBAN GHENT in collaboration with De Stadsacademie

The urban food policy of the City of Ghent, Gent en Garde, has been the subject of international attention including several prestigious prizes. At the same time, the systematic sale of public farmland in the peri-urban fringe of Ghent has alienated new and traditional farmers who are upset about the systematic loss of farmland. Farmers are rapidly disappearing from the peri-urban fringe, and new farmers face great difficulty to establish themselves.

Within the context of De Stadsacademie civil society actors, farmers, urban civil servants, students, and researchers have been engaged in the development of alternative policies regarding public-owned farmland, and public agricultural patrimony in general. In this context, we will host a number of workshops to explore the strategic potential of this public farmland for the development of future-oriented urban geography of agroecological farming. We will try to imagine new forms of urban infrastructure and future heritage that contribute to the local support of agroecological farmers and reinscribe the farming activities within new urban geography of farming. De Stadsacademie is a collaboratorium dedicated to transdisciplinary research and teaching on complex and urgent sustainability challenges faced by the city and the University of Ghent. De Stadsacademie works on several ‘trajectories’ that define the thematic scope of its work over a number of years.