Creative Food Cycles: exploring the creative dimension of regional foodsheds in Europe

Following on the UN Habitat III Conference (Quito 2016), the international scientific community has recognised through evidence-based policies the key role of cities for resource consumption. Drivers of the current metabolic rift in food provision, every day in a city the size of Barcelona, Rome and Berlin 30 million meals are consumed or disposed; 47% of urban solid waste is related to food (0.74 kg/person per day) which takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce each single kilo (Pollan, 2006; Steel, 2009; Newman & Cepeda-Márquez, 2018). The scale of this unperceived revolution has dramatically transformed the domestic economies, providing a higher level of food security in favour of the pervasive diffusion of places for trade in home products (e.g., shopping malls, discount-stores). This resulted in the relocation of common tastes at the expense of urban metabolic imbalances, making citizens more and more dependent on big distribution chains and subject to a "supermarket diet". In considering the calls for collective actions to confront future territorial and societal challenges, the role of food as an urban material concerns a quest of factors and sociospatial arrangements in place, which identify resilient food systems as integral part to Lefebvre’s notion of "the right to the city" (1968). Against this backdrop, the paper explores how the project Creative Food Cycles stimulates an intercultural dialogue between three partner cities (Hannover, Barcelona, Genova) by enhancing creative co-design practices, teaching experiences and participatory actions to trigger social awareness about Urban Metabolism and regional geographies related to food.