Transformation through cooperation - multi-stakeholder dialog on the edible city and access to greenery and food
27. June 2024
On 22 April 2024, IFZ was involved in the planning and organization of the conference "Transformation through Cooperation V" at the Graz Museum, which was hosted by the association ACT (Actin in Commons - Actin in Transition) from Graz. The conference is an annual format with the aim of discussing topics that address the urban-rural interface with a broad range of stakeholders from the social, environmental, cultural, health and education sectors, science, civil society, agriculture, business, politics and administration.
We contributed together with our project partner Forum Urbanes Gärtnern to this year's conference topic “(More) access to green - (better) access to food! - What can the edible city contribute?” with the EU research project PLANET4B with the key question: How can an Edible City Graz help to promote biodiversity and address or even reduce multiple discriminations of those affected?
As part of our morning workshop, the IFZ team - Sandra Karner, David Steinwender, with the support of Jürgen Suschek-Berger, Melanie Troppe and Franziska Häller - collected ideas with various experts from the field and discussed what constitutes a " (Bio-)Diverse Edible City of Graz" and which needs and interests already exist in Graz. This was the start of our PLANET4B workshop series in which David Steinwender and Anita Thaler worked with a "stakeholder community" to process the thoughts and ideas generated at the conference.
In the first two stakeholder workshops after the conference, on 22 May and 20 June at the IFZ in Graz, relevant ideas from the pool of intervention proposals for a "(Bio-)Diverse Edible City" were prioritized, concretized and systematized - two of them in detail: an " Initiative for gardens and biotopes in residential areas" and "Interdisciplinary education and practice-oriented learning in all types of schools". In the process, links between direct and indirect influencing factors and support factors with a potential leverage effect were creatively developed on the basis of Donella Meadows' research framework. By the time of the next workshops in the fall, we will have taken a closer look at the supportive and obstructive aspects of both intervention proposals with regard to urban biodiversity and the reduction of (multiple) discrimination of affected people and which measures can be specifically designed for this purpose.