What happens when you mix virtual reality, city planning, data science, and a passion for locally grown food? You get the future of European urban living.
Recently, a dynamic group of researchers, urban planners, and technical experts gathered for a cross-border event to share groundbreaking tools and insights aimed at transforming cities into sustainable, inclusive, and vibrant food ecosystems. From high-tech vertical farms to therapeutic community gardens, European urban agriculture is stepping out of its niche.
Here is a deep dive into the revolutionary projects leading the charge.
FoodCityBoost: Mapping and Quantifying Urban Farming
The FoodCityBoost project is tackling a massive challenge: mapping the diversity of urban agriculture (UA) systems across Europe and proving their true environmental, social, and economic worth.
- The Vision: Project coordinator Pierre Chopin from Vrieje Universteit Amsterdam (VUA) highlighted that the team is deep-diving into everything from vertical farms to community plots to uncover structural blockers and maximize sustainability.
- Local Assessment Power: Agnès Lelièvre (AgroParisTech) introduced newly deployed toolkits specifically engineered to evaluate individual, real-world urban agricultural projects across all core pillars of development.
- The Urbanaa Self-Assessment Platform: Paola Clerino (AgroParisTech) detailed the creation of the Urbanaa tool, which is freely available online at www.urbanaa.fr. Born out of a severe lack of urban-specific assessment criteria, the platform provides 67 tailored sustainability benchmarks across project credibility, innovation, and local impacts.
- A Live Look: Software engineer Carnel Megbleto (AgroParisTech) demonstrated the live interface of the app, showing how easily stakeholders can weigh criteria, log qualitative or quantitative field data, and immediately visualize project trade-offs.
- Mapping the Drivers of Urban Farming: Paris Pencharz (VUA) presented a spatial analysis across 11 major European cities, confirming that while urban farming thrives near public green spaces, it is most prevalent in lower-value neighborhoods with fewer locally-born residents.
- Predicting City Scenarios: Looking out to the future, Anna Kirstgen (FHG) revealed that her team scanned over 94,000 articles to build the Urban Futures Food Navigator. This interactive layout maps out four potential futures for our cities, ranging from Green Autonomy to High-Tech Circular Cities.
- Feeding the City Internally: Anton Parisi (ZALF) utilized the Metropolitan Foodshed and Self-Sufficiency Scenario Model (MFSS) to reveal that integrating smart strategies like urban rooftop greenhouses and optimized allotment plots can push localized city self-sufficiency up to 8%.
- Blueprint Prototypes: Charlotte Liborio-Cornet (ASTREDHOR) shared co-designed action plans from the field, including space-sharing markets in Poland, low-cost rainwater harvesting networks in Bulgaria, and institutional support models in the Netherlands.
- The Economic Value of Shade: Marta Sylla (UpWR) brought the data on the incredible microclimatic cooling power of allotment gardens. Her research proved that urban farms cool neighborhoods up to 100 meters past their boundaries, translating to as much as 15,000 euros in yearly air-conditioning savings per farm.
Feed4Food: Putting Inclusivity First
The Feed4Food initiative reminds us that sustainable food systems must, first and foremost, be socially inclusive. Funded under the Driving Urban Transitions (DUT) framework, this project positions urban agriculture as a true socio-environmental resilience strategy.
- Targeting the Vulnerable: Project coordinator Lia van Wesenbeeck explained how their living labs in Cyprus, Greece, and Romania explicitly bring refugees, the elderly, and individuals with mental or physical disabilities into the cultivation space.
- Empowerment Through Learning: By blending experiential and social learning methodologies, the project helps marginalized participants build confidence, master regenerative farming techniques, and successfully transition back into the mainstream labor market.
CoFarm4Cities: Halting Urban Sprawl
Operating at the boundary lines where the city meets the countryside, the CoFarm4Cities project utilizes urban “fringe” farming as a visual spatial planning tool to stop unchecked urban sprawl.
- Active Urban Labs: András Guti presented findings from five cross-border pilot hubs. These include a brand-new 3-hectare permaculture development in Budapest, circular water-management infrastructure in Turin, a bio-waste composting orchard in Zagreb, and an educational farm network in Ljubljana.
- The Blueprint Guide: The project has released the UFSLU Model, a highly practical implementation manual designed to help municipal decision-makers seamlessly hand over ongoing farm operations to highly organized, localized NGOs.
Bauhaus Bites: Beautiful, Sustainable, and Together
When the visual elegance of architectural design meets sustainable agricultural planning, you get Bauhaus Bites. This initiative brings the core principles of the New European Bauhaus (NEB) straight into urban food systems.
- Global Action: Nadira Berbić walked through the project’s work co-creating nature-based food ecosystems across European trailblazer and twin cities.
- A Magical Common Space: Highlighting a local victory, Iva Bedenko shared Zagreb’s progress building a 1,000-square-meter inclusive common garden. Co-designed side-by-side with schoolchildren and therapists, this modular park features sensory trails, performance stages, and sturdy raised beds explicitly designed to ensure individuals in wheelchairs feel safe, secure, and entirely integrated into public community spaces.
FOODE & Redesign: Breaking Down the Silos
Urban agriculture cannot survive if individual projects operate in total isolation. Assistant Professor Michele D’Ostuni shared the combined evolutionary history of two interconnected Horizon Europe projects.
The Legacy of FOODE: This completed project successfully implemented 13 diverse across-the-map pilots, including an aquaponic rooftop establishment in Amsterdam North and Europe’s very first vertical research farm in Bologna.
The Dawn of Redesign: Building directly on those policy lessons, the Redesignproject coordinates multi-stakeholder municipal networks across the globe. Active living labs are currently running real-estate circular hydro-biodigesters in London East, implementing anti-urban sprawl land succession governance models in Catalonia, and utilizing a 2,500-square-meter “Global Field” prototype in Dortmund to visually advocate for sustainable, plant-based dietary shifts.
High-Tech Helpers: Talking to Maps and Virtual Reality
That’s not all, two projects deploying cutting-edge technologies to bridge the data gap between urban/rural developers and local citizens.
PolyRuralPlus & The JackDaw AI Assistant
Penny Zafiraki introduced the PolyRuralPlus project and toolbox, engineered to strengthen the spatial connections between rural resource structures and urban consumer demand.
- The Tech: They built JackDaw, an advanced, conversational Geo-AI chatbot. Instead of forcing planners to write complex database commands, users can simply “talk to maps” using completely natural language. Planners can type questions like “Could I grow maize in this area?” or “Do local market conditions support short supply chains?” and receive beautifully structured map visualizations, climate datasets, and commercial risk profiles in real-time.
Rurbanive: Immersive Extended Reality
Tina Katika shared how the Rurbanive project uses Extended Reality (XR), Augmented Reality (AR), and digital twins to make invisible resource connections across territories entirely visual and testable.
Did you miss the event?
Stay tuned for the video footage. It’s coming soon!
