Food justice and citizen-driven governance of urban agriculture. Assessing the co-creative design of multi-stakeholder governance of urban agriculture initiatives.

Food justice and citizen-driven governance of urban agriculture. Assessing the co-creative design of multi-stakeholder governance of urban agriculture initiatives Food has been absent as a concern for urban studies. This proposal reframes food as an urban question through a focus on citizen-driven governance of urban agriculture (UA) and its role in stimulating food justice. UA is a fast developing field and challenges top-down as well as bottom-up urban planning. This project responds to the need to improve our understanding of how multi-stakeholder governance models can be designed to enhance UA's contribution to food justice. The proposed research consists of three research phases. It starts with an overview of the state of the art literature from social sciences (sociology and political sciences), economic sciences (marketing and human behaviour) and design sciences (service design, design for complex systems). All influential parameteres are mapped into a digital system. The second research phases starts by mapping all urban agricultural initiatives in Flandres, based on the research outcomes and variables from the first research phase. A semi-qualitative research is set up (n=50) to evaluate the existing initiatives on their strenghts and weakenesses (eg. actors involved, contribution to food fairness, use of open spaces). The aim is to gain insights in the way citizens and other stakeholders govern urban agricultural initiatives and with what kind of mechanisms concerning inclusion and exclusion they are confronted. The third research phase consists of a co-creative seven steps design process (alternation of workshops, field research, concept development, concept testing) that gives input for the governance and the creation of three urban agricultural initiatives. The aim of this Participatory Research (PAR) phase is to gain insight in the complexity of governance processes by means of initiating co-creative interventions (common problem, common goal, common value creation) and to learn from their effects. The three studies will result in a report with recommendations to enrich the existing literature. The researchers aim to publish four scientific articles. Given the scope of the proposed research, the researchers moreover aim for a wider validation and desimilation of the results.

Keywords:INNOVATIONS, ECONOMY AND ENVIRONMENT, SOCIOLOGY, ACTION RESEARCH

Disciplines:Urban and regional design, development and planning, Applied economics, Business administration and accounting, Management, Marketing, Applied sociology, Policy and administration, Social psychology, Social stratification, Social theory and sociological methods, Sociology of life course, family and health, Other sociology and anthropology