Spatial and participatory food (systems) mapping at AESOP4FOOD

Last week, Katrin gave a lecture to an international audience at the online sustainable food planning course AESOP4FOOD. AESOP4FOOD (Action for Education, Spatial Organization and Planning for Sustainable Food) is an Erasmus+ project aiming to develop future leadership in sustainable food planning and thereby to contribute to food security, food justice and healthier environments. The lecture was part of Phase 2 of the online course: Analysing your local foodscape.

Katrin spoke about the Opportunity Mapping Process which Bohn&Viljoen Architects developed in order to guide the collaborative planning of food-productive landscapes in urban areas. This method is embedded in Bohn&Viljoen’s CPUL City Actions that we formulated in 2012 as an action plan enabling the successful and lasting implementation of Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs) in cities. Opportunity maps, as Bohn&Viljoem define them, visualise food system activities from a spatial perspective and can serve as a link between professional designers and planners, food system actors, local authorities and lay audiences. Such maps are not masterplans in the traditional planning sense, but act as strategic, conceptual steps ahead of them. They capture ideas, desires and possibilities and make them accessible for diverse audiences.

Using examples from Bohn&Viljoen’s work in Cologne (Germany), Carthage (Tunisia) and London (Great Britain), Katrin explained how the staged process starts with the generation of participatory and co-designed food maps as communication tools that enable a systematic visualisation of existing local food system spaces and activities. The mapping process then focusses on the multiple opportunities that specific food system activities can bring to certain sites or cities. The resulting opportunity maps show how and where these can become part of a coherent strategy for resilient urban food planning.

For more information on the AESOP4FOOD free online course see its own website.

For information on the CPUL City Actions see here.

The Continuous Productive Urban Landscape (CPUL) concept is here.

Image: The key elements of the Opportunity Mapping Process which is rooted in a specific local context and task and will result in a strategy for implementing productive urban landscapes. (source: Bohn&Viljoen 2012)