Knowledge on opportunity and food mapping to be shared internationally

Katrin Bohn has prepared two short lectures to be shown to an international audience of city planners, urban food practitioners and food and water researchers early next month. The lectures use knowledge gathered by Bohn&Viljoen over a number of years through their practice-based CPUL design research and condense it into bite-sized information indented to trigger discussion and inspire participants of the first working meeting of the EU-funded project Edible Cities Network (EdiCitNet).

One lecture, titled five facts about food mapping, gives an introduction to food mapping from an urban design perspective. As the city members of the project – Berlin, Carthage, Letchworth, Lomé, Montevideo, Sant Feliu de Llobregat, Šempeter-Vrtojba – will produce their own masterplans in relation to food within their communities, the lecture underpins each of its statements with an applied example of a foodmap. Spatial foodmaps are still a very young addition to urban mapping, therefore the examples selected aim to show a range of methods, aims and stakeholder involvement and come from different locations (Europe and South America) and collaborations (student projects, own projects and one relevant other project).
This lecture can be found here.

The other lecture, titled Who we are and how we map opportunities, first locates Bohn&Viljoen’s approach to opportunity mapping within the Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) design research work. It then shows three examples of opportunity maps, describes their production processes and aims and analyses their legacy for the mapped cities of Middlesbrough (UK), London (UK) and Köln [Cologne] (Germany). Opportunity mapping forms part of the “Inventory of Urban Capacity”, one of the four actions that we defined as fundamental for the long-term success of urban food-related projects. The action “Inventory of Urban Capacity” states that ‘an inventory is necessary for each location [of a food project], especially of spatial, resource, stakeholder and managerial capacities in order to best respond to local opportunities’.
You can find this lecture here.

For further information on our food and opportunity mapping work see our book Second Nature Urban Agriculture.

For information on EdiCitNet see the project’s own website.

Image: (Spatial) opportunity map for London’s Eastern expansion zone, the Thames Gateway (source: Bohn&Viljoen 2004)