Over a duration of four years, the EU-funded FUSILLI project will focus on supporting cities to facilitate their transition towards more sustainable food systems. To achieve this goal, FUSILLI combines the expertise of 34 partners from 13 countries, including cities, universities, SMEs, NGOs, and industries.
The project's core ambition is to overcome barriers for developing and implementing integrated, systemic food policies that support the transition towards sustainable food systems in urban, peri-urban and nearby rural areas. To achieve this goal, 12 cities that are part of FUSILLI will develop a living lab to innovate 12 cities in a knowledge sharing and learning network to address the challenges of the food system transformation.
Athena's role
In the four years of the FUSILLI project, our team is working towards establishing an international knowledge community on cities’ transitions towards sustainable, just and healthy food systems. Working closely with and learning from the 12 cities participating in the FUSILLI project, we aim to uncover the most pressing challenges and questions. Firstly, this helps us to identify and investigate examples of urban food system strategies, policies, and actions that best connect to cities’ learning needs. Secondly, through interviews and workshops we facilitate a reflexive learning process for the FUSILLI cities.
To further connect food actors’ questions and answers, an online knowledge platform will be established with an international outreach. This platform connects a worldwide community, shares and disseminates knowledge acquired throughout the runtime of FUSILLI through various tools and instruments, including visualisations, fact-sheets and videos, but also training on ‘systems thinking for cities’, forums, webinars, online inter-vision meetings on a specific learning question, and eye-opener workshops. Tools will be implemented and adjusted based on the needs of the cities to ensure optimal knowledge sharing and capacity building.
Our main tasks connect to our role as researchers interested in the reflexive learning processes of the FUSILLI cities. Aside from doing desk research, qualitative interviews and creative workshops are central to our methodology, using a wide variety of techniques such as learning histories, timeline interviews, and workshops. So, in a variety of ways we are both concerned with the continuous learning process of cities, as well as how to foster knowledge exchange. Leading a core working group of six other FUSILLI partners, we co-investigate practices and policies of sustainable urban food system transformation. This results in a database of showcases, forming the basis of exemplary ‘best practices’ that feed into the online knowledge platform. Moreover, we are jointly working to establish the international knowledge community on urban food system transitions.