CITY.FOOD.BASKET

Sustainable consumption made easy - regional shopping baskets for food safety and interaction

Cities are increasingly confronted with challenges such as climate change, resource scarcity and environmental pollution. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in analysing and designing the city as a nutritional space in terms of a circular economy. Topics such as food security, sustainable agriculture and the bio-economy are already integrated in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations. A key objective of various efforts such as the Milan Agreement is to provide urban areas with a sustainable supply of healthy and regional food in order to make them more resilient to crises.

To address these current and future challenges in the city as a nutritional space, the CITY.FOOD.BASKET project aims to promote regional baskets of food as a measure to increase sustainable regional food consumption in cities such as Graz and Vienna. This is based on preliminary work of the Smart Food Grid Graz project, in which the "regional food basket" was defined as a strategic measure. On the basis of personas, regional food baskets are defined for different consumer groups and created with partners from the practice. In doing so, food baskets are implemented that correspond to the realities of life of these groups. During the development process, the cycles of the urban food system from the producer to the consumer are taken into account and evaluated from an ecological, social and economic point of view.

A comprehensive environmental assessment of the different products in the food baskets and their underlying production systems by means of life cycle analysis (LCA) will enable the environmental improvement of internal production and logistics systems and show consumers the various environmental effects of their food consumption. In addition, the inclusion of actors in the project is supported by two strategic instruments, a project advisory board from practice, research, politics and media, and a citizens' advisory board. The project will also use the group delphi method to identify recommendations for the implementation of food baskets. The project results will be presented to the public by application project partners (e.g.: Zero Waste Austria) in agreement with the client, among other things by means of social media, in a more target-group oriented way.

The targeted results are an environmental, social and economic evaluation of the food basket, as well as an application of the defined food baskets by partners from practice. In addition, the baskets of goods and the inclusion of the various stakeholders into the research process will strengthen the link to a sustainable regional production, increase an environmentally friendly and health-conscious consumption, the supply and demand of regional products, and will increase the innovation potential for the provision of affordable and healthy food. In the dialogue between the Citizens' Advisory Council and the Project Advisory Council, findings on the best possible cooperation channels for the regional shopping basket will be identified.