City Team Carthage finalises food advocacy note

Since Spring 2021, Katrin Bohn and her small University of Brighton team, have been advising the City of Carthage, Tunisia, in their efforts to establish sustainable urban planning strategies with a food system focus. On 5th April 2023, the City approved one of two important documents aimed at supporting this process: an advocacy note laying out the city’s vision for an Edible Carthage.

The 30-page document presents the outcomes of a participatory planning process that began in 2019 with a comprehensive data and ideas collection. Based on this collection, the University of Brighton team, which also includes Ian Bailey and Prof. Andre Viljoen, had worked with the Carthaginians to bring together, complete, order, select and synthesise the local givens to generate tangible strategies for implementing food-focused urban planning. We used the CPUL Opportunity Mapping Method to do so, a participatory urban design and planning tool aimed at the integration of urban agriculture and food system activities into cities, developed by Bohn & Viljoen as part of their design research.

The mapping process was masterplanning-oriented from the beginning, aimed at improving environmental performance of the whole city as well as achieving a proposition about the usage of the city’s “dormant” open space which is classified as world heritage by the UNESCO and must not be built on. In relation to the city’s ten most urgent societal challenges, we facilitated a process which enabled the local team to generate and agree on visions and concepts for an Edible Carthage. Using maps and mapping, we identified three food-focused urban visions – Edible historic urban landscape, Food knowledge networks and Sustainable coastline – and four urban development concepts – Carthage in the world, Agriculture as economic pillar, Self-sufficient city and A new generation of farmers all of whom were achieved through iterative, conceptual mappings in live meetings and on the Miro board.

The project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research program, as part of its EdiCitNet project.

For more information on the Carthage City Team see here.

For information on Carthage see here.

For more information on the design and our contribution to this process see here.

Image: This food map was created for and with the Municipality as part of a participatory process aimed at making Carthage an ‘edible city’. (source: Katrin Bohn with Ian Bailey, University of Brighton, and City Team Carthage 2021)