Food citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities: solidarity and diversity, skills and scale

Project Information

FOOD CITIZENS

Grant agreement ID: 724151

DOI

10.3030/724151

Project closed

EC signature date 9 August 2017

Start date 1 September 2017

End date 29 February 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 999 761,00

EU contribution

€ 1 999 761,00

Coordinated by

UNIVERSITEIT LEIDEN
Netherlands

Periodic Reporting for period 5 - FOOD CITIZENS (Food citizens? Collective food procurement in European cities:solidarity and diversity, skills and scale)

Reporting period: 2023-09-01 to 2024-02-29

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The project analysed citizens’ initiatives in food procurement, at the level of urban foraging, short chains, and governance. It asked if and how the diversity of such initiatives surpasses or confirms hegemonic ideas about ‘who belongs’.

In more than 30 publications amongst book chapters and articles (listed at www.foodcitizens.eu) it answered that context is of paramount importance to define if collective food procurement networks reinforce neoliberal processes such as gentrification, or if they are indeed transformative.

The goal was to alert scholars, activists, citizens and policy makers to sociocultural diversity instead of imposing homogeneous ‘sustainability fixes’ to a diversity of cultures and styles of provisioning.

The challenge was to study, analyse and convey how styles of food procurement express and are co-produced by cultural styles of participation. It is important to validate and represent this diversity, to counteract policy imaginaries of transitions to sustainability as a mere question of finding ‘technology fixes’ that should be rolled out into 'society' and should work indifferently for everyone everywhere.

This project used participant observation in European cities and produced an interactive digital platform to visualize multiple narratives and practices of collective food procurement, in order to advance a nuanced understanding of European citizenship vis-à-vis sustainability challenges.

The objective was to observe and communicate how relevant cultures of participation enable certain ways of innovating food procurement and not others, so that the diversity and specificity of cultures of participation within Europe can be taken into consideration in initiatives, analyses and policies that deal with the transformation and transitions or vice versa the traditions of food procurement.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The Food citizens? team has included two post-docs, three Ph.D. candidates and two research assistants working with the Principal Investigator. The project Winter School (January-February 2022) further involved nine Masters and Ph.D. candidates from the universities of Bologna, Gothenburg, Kaunas, Leiden, Louvain, Tromsø, Turin and Utrecht.
Begun September 2017, the project involved a literature review on the topics of solidarity, diversity, skills and scale in the anthropology of food, as well as case study essays on urban agriculture, short food chains, and local food councils. These are available open access on our project’s website, under Dissemination/public resources.
The PhD candidates received bespoke training in audiovisual methods and participated in dedicated seminars with experts in the topics and regions they studied. Guest speakers included ERC laureates Tim Ingold, Erik Bähre, Anouk de Koning, Marianne Maeckelbergh, Martijn Koster, NWO-VICI winner Bart Barendregt and Spinoza laureate Birgit Meyer.
The project website www.foodcitizens.eu publicizes all the products of research and training under Dissemination/public resources. These include weekly seminars and reading lists, template case studies, annotated bibliography, research protocol, audiovisual training program, etc.
The Ph.D. training program ran from 5th February 2018 to 11th July 2018, and continued from August 31st – December 15the 2018. It covered theoretical and methodological topics, a practical introduction to audio-visual media, and guest lectures.
The PI and team had face-to-face and skype meetings with stakeholders and members of the advisory board, plus established connections and conversations with numerous researchers who provided guest lectures and seminars (for example Michael Herzfeld, Coco Kanters, Cees Bronsveld, Jan-Willem van der Schans, Manpreet Janeja, Fabio Parasecoli, Mateusz Halawa and Bradley Jones among others).
The Ph.D. candidates conducted 17 months of fieldwork each in the cities of Gdansk, Rotterdam and Turin respectively, interspersed with periods of intensive teamwork. Ethnographic field-sites were identified and brainstormed for their potential significance in the contexts of food self-procurement, short food chains and food governance. They were investigated, according to the project’s research protocol, with the method of participant observation with an additional battery of qualitative methods including in-depth interviews, mapping, documentary analysis, focus groups and video- or photo-elicitation.
Three symposia were held to discuss work in progress with the project’s advisory board in the cities of Leiden (in June 2018 and January 2020) and Gdańsk (May 2019). The project and winter school conference was held in Leiden (February 2022). Local restitution workshops with stakeholders and scholars were held in the cities of Gdańsk (May 2022), and Turin (November 2022).
The project continued until February 2024, investing in scientific dissemination and societal engagement. Milestone publications include the launch of the i-doc on the project’s website (https://www.foodcitizens.eu/idoc/) and two journal special issues: on ‘Collaboration, Mediation and Comparison’ for the Anthrovision VANEASA online journal (vol. 8.1 published online 15th August 2022) and on ‘Skills for Sustainability’ for KE, the Journal of Swedish Anthropology (vol. 5, n. 1-2, published online February 2023).

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Conceptually, we delivered a critical analysis of food citizenship, adding a ‘meso’ level of sociocultural analysis to food scenarios, which mostly focus on the ‘macro’ (food systems) or ‘micro’ (individual deliberations and habituated reflexes) scale.
Methodologically, we matched in-depth fieldwork observation with participants’ narratives, using pioneering digital visual media to deliver collaborative and immersive ‘thick descriptions’ of their experiences and trajectories. Societal and local government stakeholders granted access and benefitted from insights, also in ‘restitution’ workshops in Turin and Gdansk.

The project’s Digital Platform, edited and coded by Federico De Musso, represents this field research in a synoptic way (see https://www.universiteitleiden.nl/en/foodcitizens/about/interactive-platform).

The teams’ publications and featured dissemination activities examine the different types, premises and consequences of collective forms of food production, distribution and consumption in the three European cities and beyond.

The project’s Winter School crowned the PhD candidates’ four-year long period of research, engagement and apprenticeship by passing on the project’s methodological tool-kit to a selected cohort of nine Master and Ph.D. candidates. The project’s conference presented the first results of the field research, the Digital Platform and the Winter School projects.

The project blog disseminated attended conferences, advisory board meetings, field trips, and interventions from researchers in cognate fields (www.foodcitizens.eu).

Project i-doc, courtesy of Federico De Musso