‘Foodprints’ - a project investigating the role of Artistic and Design-based research within urban agriculture

Other conference contribution, 2012

The presentation will demonstrate how the project ‘Foodprints’ was created from a platform of artistic and design-based research with empirical methods for data from unique urban-agro sites, multi-disciplinary input, quantitative analysis, literature, and the art of cooking in sensory design. The presentation demonstrates the project’s aspirations to instigate change on 3 levels: urban planning, design approaches and city inhabitant levels. It will also serve as an introduction and discourse into research questions currently explored in my doctoral. ‘Foodprints’ is a biologically-centered design and discussion toolkit for developing an urban food strategy amongst city designers, inhabitants and planners. The project applied concepts taken from biomimicry, systems thinking and scenario building to support development for new urban food models that could function mimicking the remarkable efficiencies found in nature. The toolkit produced a methodology to map the behavior of citizens, politics, architecture, logistics, food, farming and ecology within the urbanscape. It envisioned the city as a multi-organism, not as a fragmented site, and devised a catalyst to help navigate through the diversely complex issues surrounding urban agriculture and individual’s food relationships, creating a discussion platform for food, its stakeholders, urban metabolism, and opportunities towards a resilient future. Although ‘Foodprints’ was primarily aimed as a tool for developers, planners, architects and others in the built environment professions, it could also be used as an educational tool that could further be adopted in schooling, workshops, and everyday discourse about urban food logistics. Particular consideration was paid to urban planning policy for instigating ‘food strategies’ into policy-making as much as energy, water and waste have become. The project worked in collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, KTH and FoAM to narrow down our catalyst framework typologies to 8 themes. The presentation will discuss each typology, docked also in its relevance to research on planetary boundaries and ecosystem services by the resilience centre. The methodology had strong foundations in artistic and design-based research. We explored whether and how to make these research typologies a serious consideration in built environment fields. We examined imaginative approaches to challenge urban planning mindsets by using diverse strategies both as inspiration and dissemination.