Introduction
In current scientific and political debates, urban areas are considered to be significant locations for the fostering of sustainability transformations. (Frantzeskaki et al., 2017; Wolfram 2018). Key measures analyzed in urban ecology research are nature-based solutions (NBS) which can contribute to urban transformations of and in cities by addressing urgent social-ecological challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss or social segregation (Giachino et al. 2022; Raymond et al. 2017). NBS can be defined as “solutions that are inspired and supported by nature, are cost-effective, simultaneously provide environmental, social and economic benefits, and help build resilience” (European Comission, n.d.). One example for innovative NBS are edible city initiatives that offer (free) food for urban residents in public spaces, thereby addressing a range of environmental, social, and economic challenges (Sartison and Artmann 2020). Edible cities nurture the (re)integration of urban green spaces, thereby contributing to multifunctional sustainable landscapes (Mino et al. 2021). They have the potential to mitigate extreme weather events caused by climate change (Kingsley et al. 2021), they can promote social cohesion and a connection between urban residents and their environment (Russo and Cirella 2020), while supporting a positive image of cities and job-creation, thereby strengthening local economic sustainability (Sartison and Artmann 2020). All in all, edible cities can be considered to be an important urban common “which includes any common space, natural or modified, within city and peri-urban limits that contains naturally growing edible plants and mushrooms” (Sardeshpande et al. 2020, p. 1). Sustainability transformation, through urban agriculture in general and edible cities specifically, is in fact being particularly explored in current urban ecology research by assessing its multidimensional impacts (Plassnig et al., 2022). Such evaluations are mostly conducted based on indicators (Ilieva et al. 2022; Tapia et al. 2021) consisting, for instance, of biophysical (e.g., herbaceous plant richness relevant for urban pollinators (Zhao et al. 2019)), sociocultural (e.g. strengthening of place attachment through edible cities (Artmann et al. 2020)), or monetary descriptors (e.g. cost-benefit analysis of urban agriculture (Hosseinpour et al. 2022)).
However, although current research is emphasizing the importance of realizing edible cities and their well-researched benefits in order to foster sustainability transformation (Artmann et al. 2020), it still lacks an understanding of the success that has been achieved in transforming the sustainability of cities by rendering them edible (Plassnig et al., 2022). On a general level, scarce access to urban spaces, the difficulties inherent in securing food safety, long-lasting financing and a lack of political commitment are identified by research as constraining urban planning leaders and residents to co-implement edible cities (Hajzeri and Kwadwo 2019; Sartison and Artmann 2020; Säumel et al. 2019; Scharf et al. 2019). However, the transformation towards an edible city cannot be described through simple reductionist cause-effect connections, but needs to take into account complex and ambiguous relationships between different actors and their integration into the physical space, organizational structures and institutions (Reiß and Artmann 2023). To deepen transformation knowledge (i.e. how to strategically mainstream edible cities) an interlinkage between urban ecology research and concepts from transformation literature is therefore meaningful.
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This is being accomplished in current research by testing the success of the implementation of edible cities through living labs (Plassnig et al., 2022; Reiß and Artmann 2023; Säumel et al. 2019), which are “(…) understood as temporal spaces where local stakeholders develop, test, and optimize Edible City Solutions according to their specific objectives and needs” (Plassnig et al., 2022, p. 3). In general, urban living labs are an important transdisciplinary methodological approach to better understand the diffusion of social innovations for sustainability transformation (Von Wirth et al. 2019). Linked with this approach are transition experiments which can support research to increase our understanding regarding how to co-create and co-design sustainability change in living labs (Von Wirth and Levin-Keitel 2020; Williams and Robinson 2020). In an urban context, transition experiments are on-site practice-based experiments embedded in urban transition labs providing institutional spaces for social learning nourished by long-term visioning (Ehnert 2023).
In such living labs the process progression for transition experiments aiming at realizing edible cities through various engaged stakeholders can be analyzed. Thus, transformation describes deep changes which need to be understood as social change processes (Feola 2015), which goes beyond the general identification of constraints and drivers realizing edible cities (Sartion & Artmann, 2020; Säumel et al. 2019). Transformative change is understood by transformation research as a process consisting of different phases which are described in more or less detail (Glaas et al. 2019). To evaluate process progression in an integrative and clear manner, Glaas et al. (2019) suggest focusing on the three phases of initiating, innovating and scaling-up. In fact, also the transformation of edible cities can be assessed based on these three phases (Reiß and Artmann 2023). Actions that are related to the first phase of initating include preparatory measures such as a more in-depth analysis of a social problem (e.g. decline of biodiversity in the city) and planning steps to address this problem (concrete development of ideas and goals). In the second phase of innovating, the main focus is on concrete measures to implement the planned steps, e.g., the implementation of campaigns or specific events to attract new sustainability initiative members. The last phase of scaling-up includes all steps that can be considered as the broader implementation of the new social practices, e.g., the inclusion of the innovations in existing organizations or other dissemination by other actors (Glaas et al. 2019). Recent research dealing with transformative progresses of edible cities (Plassnig et al. 2022; Świąder et al. 2023) and urban agriculture in general focus on the phase of up-scaling (Hardman et al. 2022; Petrovics and Giezen 2022) neglecting the phases of initiating and innovating. Major results are that scaling pathways are dependent on the local context and engaged actors whereby any success correlates with the multistakeholder´s capacities to co-create urban food production (Petrovics and Giezen 2022; Plassnig et al., 2022).
Through the lens of sustainability transformation literature, it can be said that edible city actors need transformative capacities to efficiently tackle deep changes from unsustainable to sustainable trajectories and their important phases comprising initating, innovating and up-scaling (Glaas et al. 2019). Originally, the concept of transformative capacity was developed to explore the self-efficacy of states and their collaboration with industry to address effects of global economic change on the industry sector (Weiss 2005). Current sustainability research has seen a major lack of applying the concept in an urban context which is crucial in light of rapid urbanization (Shahani et al. 2021; Wolfram 2016). Subsequently, in order to identify the joint capacity of various stakeholders to foster sustainability transformations in cities, the concept of urban transformative capacity (UTC) by Wolfram (2016) is gaining momentum in sustainability science (cf. Shahani et al. 2021). UTC describes “(…) the collective ability of the stakeholders involved in urban development to conceive of, prepare for, initiate and perform path-deviant change towards sustainability within and across multiple complex systems that constitute the cities they relate to” (Wolfram 2016, p. 126). Current research dealing with the concept of UTC addresses various urban sustainability challenges such as climate transition (Glaas et al. 2019), urban regeneration (Wolfram 2019), low-carbon urban innovations (Shahani et al. 2021) and inclusive adaption planning (Ziervogel 2019). However, although some recent initial research places NBSs in the context of UTC (Shahani et al. 2021), to our knowledge, there is a lack of assessments of edible cities as innovative NBS connecting urban stakeholders from civic societies and urban planning aimed at collaborative contributions towards urban transformations (Reiß and Artmann 2023).
A key advantage of the UTC concept is its systematization of complex and sometimes ambiguous transformative processes between various stakeholders and sectors (Glaas et al. 2019). Also, the required multi-stakeholder approach for co-creating edible cities is based on complex cooperation and decision-making processes between civic initiatives, urban politics and administration that can be constrained by bureaucratic hurdles or lacking of recourse (Scharf et al. 2019; Plassning et al., 2021). In fact, the expression of collaborative challenges differs along the various process progression phases (Reiß and Artmann 2023). This complexity requires from the urban actors a range of key transition activities strategically bundled in key action areas (cf. Glaas et al. 2019) in order to influence the implementation success of edible cities along the various phases of process progression including initiating, innovating and scaling-up. In aid in the effort to, specifically, upscale edible cities, current research has implicitly identified various key action areas and related transition activities, i.e., empowerment (e.g. sharing knowledge, networking) or urban regeneration (e.g. assuring environmental justice, pro-environmental gardening) to name only a few (Plassning et al., 2022; Säumel et al. 2019). However, since research on edible city realization is in general and in particular in its infancy, through the lens of UTC there is to date a lack of a structured identification of relevant key action areas and interlinked transition activities and their systematic assessment of its process progression across various transition phases. Such a systematic assessment can support actors engaged in transdisciplinary research to identify common and different patterns that can likewise support or constrain their efforts to foster sustainability transformation (Glaas et al. 2019).
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Therefore, in the focus of this paper, there are two research questions: (1) What are the key action areas and transition activities for co-creation of edible cities? (2) What various process progressions of key action areas and transition activities can be systematically assessed for initiating, innovating, and up-scaling edible cities? To answer these questions, the objectives of this paper are to identify and systematically evaluate common and distinct patterns of key action areas and related transition activities relevant for realizing edible cities collaboratively along their process progression. To achieve the targets, this paper first of all presents results of a transdisciplinary research project from Dresden (Germany) in which we accompanied two civic edible city initiatives (ECIs) addressing the implementation of edible cities. Sections 2 and 3 introduce the case study and methods. Results are presented in Sect. 4 and discussed in Sect. 5 through the lens of urban commons, while main conclusions are drawn in Sect. 6.
Case study
To study the co-implementation of edible cities, we explored transition experiments in Dresden (Germany) aiming at implementing the idea of an edible city. This study and selected transition experiments are part of the transdisciplinary research project “Dresden – City of the Future” (https://www.zukunftsstadt-dresden.de/). The overall objective of this project is that residents and scientists co-create and test innovative ideas and projects (i.e. transition experiments) that make the city of Dresden (i.e. real world laboratory) more sustainable (Ehnert et al. 2022). In this project, two out of ten transition experiments dealt with the concept of edible city. The initiative “Edible Public Urban Green Space – Tended by Citizens” (PublicEC) prevailed with its idea of civically planned, maintained and harvested edible public green spaces. Major aims of the team are citizen participation, environmental education, and fostering food self-sufficiency. With the support of the urban administration, PublicEC thereby co-created model areas with edible cultivated and wild plants in public areas. Urban residents should actively participate in the realization and maintenance of the edible areas. The team of the “Edible City District Plauen” (DistrictEC) aims at fostering the use of publicly accessible edible plant varieties in an urban district by its residents. The overall aim by the ECI is to raise awareness of seasonal and local food which is growing at the doorstep. This is done by developing and offering food processing workshops, city walks, and a mapping of the existing edible trees and shrubs in the urban district.
Since both of the ECIs share a common context but are different units of analysis, we decided on a single embedded case study design (Yin 2014). Embedded in the city-region of Dresden and as part of the City of the Future-project, PublicEC and DistrictEC find the same initial conditions. While they share the same local governance patterns, they also could count on specific support measures provided by the City of the Future-project. As two out of a total number of ten transition experiments, they not only passed a transdisciplinary co-production and co-evaluation process together with a research team; they were also provided with funding for the project period. Furthermore, they share a bigger vision – greening and transforming the city in a way that citizens can easily harvest food in public spaces. Besides this, they are both organized bottom-up. However, the two edible city initiatives as units of analysis are quite different with regard to their activity focus, their spatial reach and their level of implemented citizen participation (see Table 1). By comparing these two ECIs, we intended to identify commonalities and differences among them. This study focusses on the identification and evaluation of the process progression of their key action areas and transition activities in realizing an edible city in Dresden. In the course of the research project we had the opportunity to study their activities over a period of about 2.5 years.
Table 1
Overview of the two edible city initiatives studied
Edible city initiative (ECI) | Edible Public Urban Green Spaces – Tended by Citizens (PublicEC) | Edible City District Plauen (DistrictEC) |
|---|---|---|
Content Focus | Participatory planning, development, activation and maintenance of the city’s public spaces for edible plants. | Identification of edible plants on public spaces and raising urban resident´s knowledge and awareness about it. |
Spatial Focus | Area of the city of Dresden. | Dresden’s city-district Plauen. |
Methods
In order to answer our research questions, we are focusing, on the one hand, on urban ecology research exploring the implementation of edible cities to identify key action areas and integrated transition activities (see research question 1). On the other hand, we are linking this knowledge with transformation research for developing an analytical framework to systematically evaluate the process progression of these (see research question 2). Therefore, the work of Glaas et al. (2019) served as a basis for systematizing the undertakings of the transition initiatives PublicEC and DistrictEC. Glaas et al. (2019) developed a framework for assessing and communicating progress for governing urban climate transition. How the framework looks in detail and how we have adopted it to answer our research questions, is elaborated in the following sub-sections.
Identification of key action areas and transition activities
To systematically assess the transformative capacity of local governance in urban climate transition, Glaas et al. (2019) figured out that there are key action areas and related transition activities which stakeholders implement in order to reach their aims. Based on a literature review, they identified 36 key transition activities (e.g., increasing the share of renewable energy and sustainable transportation, protecting biological diversity) which were merged into eight thematic key action areas (e.g., energy, transport, biodiversity) relevant for urban climate transition.
For the analysis and evaluation of the edible city initiatives PublicEC and DistrictEC, we adapted the framework of the approach mentioned above. Based on regular team meetings with both ECIs and literature from the field of edible cities and collaborative urban greening, we captured key action areas and transition activities. Additionally, since our project follows a transdisciplinary approach, the identified key action areas and transition activities were then contemplated and finalized together with the teams of PublicEC and DistrictEC.
Assessing the process progression of key action areas and transition activities
Following Glaas et al. (2019) we developed process progression indicators to assess how successful the implementation of edible cities was for each transition experiment. While we were, similar to Glaas et al. (2019), focusing the first two phases on initiating and innovating, we broadened the perspective on the third phase of up-scaling. Based on transformation literature on different mechanisms playing a role when moving “beyond the seeding of alternative experiments” (Ehnert et al. 2018, p. 1), we decided to identify the last phase as “acceleration” in order to capture acceleration mechanisms including, but not limited to, scaling-up (Reiß and Artmann 2023). These three phases pave the ground to systematically assess the process progression of the identified key transition activities. The overall aim of the assessment is to render commonalities between the phases and ECIs visible, which can help local stakeholders to reflect about their transformative capacities (cf. Glaas et al. 2019). Therefore, our methodological approach evaluates qualitative data quantitatively.
Qualitative data collection and analysis feeding into the process progression assessment
In order to assess the process progression of key action areas and transition activities of PublicEC and DistrictEC, we resorted to two different qualitative survey methods: expert interviews (PublicEC: 7, DistrictEC: 3) and document analyses (PublicEC: 7, DistrictEC: 7). The expert interviews were conducted with all (active) team members of the ECIs as well as with relevant cooperation partners, including representatives from civil society-led initiatives and from the city administration of Dresden, other public institutions, and also cooperation partners from the economic sector. For this purpose, an interview guide was designed in order to capture the key transition activities which the two edible city initiatives pursued in order to initiate, innovate and accelerate activities that foster a transition towards an edible city. The interviews have been transcribed with the tool Amberscript. Besides this, the quarterly project reports PublicEC and DistrictEC handed into the local project office served as an additional source of information. Hence, we combined a document analysis and the interview procedure to triangulate our findings. All materials have been analyzed with the software MAXQDA.
For an analysis of the conducted interviews and text material, it was important to find a procedure that allows an analysis of the data in a theory-based manner, but also provides opportunities for the exploration of new, previously unconsidered aspects. For the present study, qualitative content analysis (Mayring 2014) was chosen as an analysis method because it offers an approach that allows a rule-guided exhaustive and cross-subject comprehensible interpretation of extensively written materials based on an established category system (Bortz and Döring 2016). Therefore, categories can be formed deductively as well as inductively (Mayring 2014). In the case of the present work, the key transition activities as well as their specific manifestations served as categories for the qualitative content analysis (see Appendix).
Quantitative process progression assessment
The results of the qualitative content analysis served as the basis for further quantitative assessment of the process progression of the key action areas and transition activities. As was the case in the method of Glaas et al. (2019), we assigned scores for the identified key activities and the related individual process phase (initiating, innovating, accelerating). In the work by Glaas et al. (2019), the scores range from 0 to 3 and identify thereby “(…) firstly, three main phases: initiation, innovating, and scaling-up [in our case: accelerating, author´s note] and, secondly, the spread of action within and outside the local municipal administration” (Glaas et al. 2019, p. 3). To evaluate the importance of the key transition activities and their common and varying patterns between both ECIs, we analyzed the results by means of a quantitative content analysis (Coe and Scacco 2017), counting the appearance of the key transition activities (e.g. activating stakeholders/networks in order to foster civic participation) and their concrete manifestations (e.g. either horizontal or vertical cooperation, see Appendix) in the respective report and interview transcripts found per assessment category. The assessment was thereby based on transformation literature thereby referring in particular to work by Glaas et al. (2019), Ehnert et al. (2018), and Ziervogel et al. (2019).
For the scoring and its counting, we applied a binary scoring approach where 0 was chosen when no related activity per main phase and degree of actor-spreading was identified and 1 when such an activity could be recorded. In the first planning phase, the needs are first identified within the initiative itself (score 1), and then plans or goals for horizontal (score 1) or vertical collaborations (score 1) are developed. In the second innovating phase, either guidelines or tasks for horizontal cooperation (score 1) and related measures for their implementation (score 1) are put into practice, or the targeted guidelines and measures of implementation address the vertical cooperation (score 1). In order to speak of the third phase, which was named by Glaas et al. (2019) as the “up-scaling phase” which we decided to refer to as the progress of acceleration, we recognized different key transition activity manifestations based on the sustainability transition literature. Here, Ehnert et al. (2018) suggest that there must be signs of concrete growth or imitation in the form of newly emerging, similar initiatives (upscaling and/or replication, score 1). Further evidence of acceleration is given when either financial security of the civic initiative exists (instrumentalization) or organizational structures and guiding principles of the city administration are embedded (score 1). A key transformative capacity of acceleration relates to the existence of intermediaries who mediate between stakeholders and sectors (public, private, citizens) (partnerships/intermediaries, score 1) (Ehnert et al. 2018, Ziervogel et al., 2019) (see Fig. 1). Based on the quantitative scoring of the qualitative material, we summarized all values gained in an accumulated score for each ECI per project phase, key action area and key transition activity. This summary was further placed in comparison to allow a differentiated analysis of the results.
Fig. 1
The case study approach investigating the three process stages initiating, innovating and accelerating of two transition experiments fostering an edible city in Dresden
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In order to be able to compare the two ECIs with regard to their activities, we chose the following steps to align the data: since fewer interviews could be made for DistrictEC, we multiplied the coded sequences of the ECI by a factor of 2.33 during the evaluation. This factor was derived from the ratio of the number of interviews from PublicEC to DistrictEC (7 to 3 interviews leveled out by multiplying by a factor of 2.33). Thus, the interview sequences were weighted equally despite the difference in baseline between the two ECIs.
Process progression visualization
The overall aim of the quantitative evaluation of the document analysis and interviews is to translate the results into a visualization that makes commonalities and differences of process progression of ECIs recognizable and is understandable for non-academic stakeholders. Therefore, the visualization of the results was implemented with the aid of the Florence Nightingale graph. Thus, based on their cooperation with municipal councilors and coordinators for local climate transitions, Glaas et al. (2019) deduced that the visual representation of the developed assessment framework improved awareness and memory of the complex processes, subsequently increasing UTC, which in the end supports the governance of those processes.
In order to compare the key action areas and key transition activities to each other, and also to allow comparisons between both ECIs, the following steps were taken: a maximum achievable value for the key transition activities was established. This was 220, which was the highest value achieved by an ECI within a key transition activity category. For further analysis, this value represented a guideline value – this could potentially be the maximum value to be achieved for an ECI within a key transition activity category. The other achieved values were put into comparison with this. In this way, statements could be made to answer research question 1, and about how important which activity was for the ECIs, and on which activities the ECIs mainly concentrated (see Table 2).
Table 2
Overview of levels of pronunciation of the different key transition activities for the Florence Nightingale charts
Level | Score | Range in relation to maximum (n = 220) | Stands for key transition activities that are… | Color |
|---|---|---|---|---|
0 | 0 | 0 | Non-existent | Red |
1 | 0.1 to 33.3% | 1 to 73 | Less pronounced | Orange |
2 | 33.3–66.6% | 74 to 147 | Pronounced | Yellow |
3 | 66.6–100% | 148 to 220 | Highly pronounced | Blue |
Results
The two ECIs studied had about two years to implement their ideas of an edible city in Dresden, Germany. From the beginning of their activities, which started with planning and innovating and ended with attempts to embed the new practices, a total of three years passed. In terms of our accompanying research, applying and testing the adopted assessment framework by Glaas et al. (2019) provided insights into the variety of key action areas and related transition activities (see research question 1) as well as their different and similar patterns of process progression along the three phases of initiating, innovating, and accelerating (see research question 2).
Relevance of key action areas and transition activities for a transition towards edible cities
In total we defined, based on both ECIs and respective literature, two key action areas of a collaborative realization of edible cities. The two key action areas address (1) civic participation and (2) cooperative area activation, defined by ten integrated key transition activities (see Table 3). Analysis of the interviews and quarterly reports could be well captured with these two key action areas in both ECIs.
For both ECIs, the quantitative evaluation of the interviews and document analysis visualizes differences and common patterns in terms of the relevance of the key action areas and related transition activities for transformation towards an edible city (see Fig. 2). In terms of occurring distinctions, the relevance of both key action areas and their related transition activities differ between each other. Thus, it is particularly striking that a large part of the reported activities is concentrated on the area of “civic participation” in both ECIs. Further differences when analyzing the key action areas become visible when comparing the ECIs. In the case of “civic participation”, particular DistrictEC focused on activities related to participation. In contrast, for the PublicEC, “cooperative area activation” was of much higher relevance to foster an edible city. Here, PublicEC focused in particular on transition activities aiming at collaboratively activating and maintaining edible areas with urban residents and local partners such as the university library or brownfields.
Table 3
Key action areas and key transition activities of edible city initiatives
Key Action Area | No. | Key Transition Activity | Literature |
|---|---|---|---|
1) Civic participation | 1.1) | Activate stakeholders/networks to foster civic participation | Sartison and Artmann (2020) |
1.2) | Spreading information about the project | Sartison and Artmann (2020) | |
1.3) | Making benefits of edible cities and their participation visible | Sartison and Artmann (2020) | |
1.4) | Practical educational support for implementing/using edible cities through citizens | Sartison and Artmann (2020) | |
1.5) | Empowerment of citizens for self-governance and self-organization | ||
1.6) | Fostering social cohesion and community building | Sartison and Artmann (2020) | |
2) Cooperative area activation | 2.1) | Identification of suitable edible areas | Sartison and Artmann (2020) |
2.2) | Monitoring of suitable edible areas | Sartison and Artmann (2020) | |
2.3) | Activation of property for edible areas | ||
2.4) | Support maintenance of edible areas and preservation of existing natural capital of the city |
In terms of common patterns within the key action areas, we can conclude that transition activities in the key action area of “civic participation” have been for both ECIs (1) activating stakeholders/networks to foster citizen participation, (2) spreading information about the project and (3) providing practical educational support. In contrast, transition activities undertaken to empower citizens and to foster social cohesion have been, for the most part, rare in both cases. In fact, according to the ECIs the empowerment of citizens in terms of activation and long-term involvement of volunteers was difficult.
Fig. 2
Frequency of mentioned key action areas and transition activities for the projects “Edible Public Urban Green Spaces – Tended by Citizens” (PublicEC) and “Edible City District Plauen” (DistrictEC)
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Process progressions of key action areas and transition activities
For systematically assessing the process progression for both ECIs, the Florence Nightingale charts visualize the key transition activities for initiating, innovating and accelerating edible cities (see Fig. 3). The systematic evaluation clearly showed differences and common patterns between the three phases of its process progression which we reflect in the following paragraphs chronologically.
The visual representations indicate that major differences between the ECIs are found in the phase of initiating which is much more pronounced by DistricEC than by PublicEC. In particular, DistrictEC focused its activities in the initiating phase on “civic participation”, whereas need for actions and related plans for fostering educational support for implementing and using edible cities through citizens stood at the forefront. In contrast, the phase of initiating did not receive much attention by PublicEC. We found that PublicEC addressed in the initiating phase in particular the activation of stakeholders and networks to foster civic participation. The ECI and interviewed cooperation partners have been brainstorming on a range of common events such as plans for educational offers with schools or engagement with civic biodiversity experts in citizen science projects.
As a common pattern we found that PublicEC and DistrictEC carried out most of the transition activities during the second phase of innovating. The focus in this phase is for both ECIs on the key action area “civic participation”. The three most pronounced transition activities focus on the implementation of concrete measures aiming at the activation of stakeholders/networks for promoting civic participation as well as the spreading of information about the project and fostering educational support for realizing and using edible cities through citizens. The latter two were more relevant for DistrictEC, whose team experimented with various collaborative participation and education formats. For instance, the ECI participated at a university’s lecture for master students lead by one author of this paper, in which a strolling route was developed in which residents could experience and learn about edible wild plants. A similar tool was tested by PublicEC which offered so-called vision rides. These are bike tours with interested residents for whom the routes have been strategically planned along potential or already realized urban edible areas that can be supported by citizens. However, as in the initiating phase, the activation of stakeholders and networks was, also for PublicEC in the innovating phase, the most pronounced transition activity. In fact, this transition activity was, in this phase, the only one that was highly pronounced by PublicEC across all phases.
The acceleration phase shows, in its overall shaping, similar patterns between both ECIs. Thus, when compared to the phases of initiating and innovating, both ECIs put less focus on transition activities during this phase. Nevertheless, we could identify some important activities targeting the acceleration of PublicEC and DistrictEC. In this regard we were able to find that PublicEC strategically continued, from the initiating and innovating phase through to the acceleration phase, its transition activities to activate stakeholders and networks for fostering civic participation. This was done in this phase by activating partners and intermediaries to distribute their plans for implementing an edible city across sectors. The network activities include a wide variety of representatives from numerous sectors: various departments within the city administration, the local public transport company, fishing and hunting clubs, as well as universities, research institutions, schools, and art and leisure associations. Furthermore, in the acceleration phase, a sponsoring concept was developed by PublicEC together with various partners to ensure long-lasting successes beyond the funding by the City of the Future-project. The focus on networking and stakeholder activation was also closely linked to the key action area “cooperative area activation” and measures to innovate and accelerate transition activities to activate property for edible areas and to support its co-maintenance together with partners. This strategy was developed to secure the continuation of PublicEC after the funding through the project City of the Future. A major example for accelerating the project by DistrictEC was the aim to implement the developed strolling route for another district together with local partners. A continuous process progression of the transition activity education for urban residents is thereby secured by DistrictEC along all three phases. The focus on education also corresponded to transition activities related with cooperative area activation, at the initiating and innovating phase in particular. In the centre of attention here was the aim to implement, together with the local university and an ECI-network colleague, a digital map making public accessible edible plants visible through suggested digital strolling routes. An acceleration of this digital map by, for instance, replicating similar strolling routs with a focus on edible wild plants in other districts, is currently under development, supported by follow-up funding. Therefore, transition activities aiming at identifying suitable edible areas are less pronounced in the acceleration phase of the project funding City of the Future.
Fig. 3
Characteristics of the frequencies of mentions of the specific key transition activities broken down by transition experiment (Edible Public Urban Green Spaces – Tended by Citizens (PublicECEPUGS) and Edible City District Plauen (DistrictEC) and process phase (initiation, innovation and acceleration)
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Discussion
In this study, we adapted the framework by Glaas et al. (2019) to shed light on the various key action areas and embedded transition activities for collaboratively initiating, innovating, and accelerating edible cities using the example of the transdisciplinary research project City of the Future in Dresden (Germany). Based on a quantitative evaluation of interviews and document analysis we were able to illustrate commonalities and differences in key action areas and transition activities and their process progression), which we reflect in the next two sections. In Sect. 5.3 we critically examine our study limitations.
Cooperatively activating land for edible urban commons
With three times as many activities in the key action area of citizen participation compared to land activation, it is evident for both ECIs that the involvement of societal actors in the activities of the ECIs serves as a foundation for the bottom-up implementation of an edible city. In fact, a successful realization of edible cities is based on co-creation of urban space nourished by engaged residents and participatory multi-stakeholder groups (Plassnig et al. 2022; Sartison and Artmann 2020). However, a basic limitation of fostering urban food production is the access to land. Thus, land access in cities is a major constraint due to its lack of availability, other demands on land-uses (e.g. settlement and transport areas), and its suitability regarding soil contamination and proximity to transport in order to secure food quality (Artmann and Sartison 2018; Badami and Ramankutty 2015; Hajzeri and Kwadwo 2019). Despite these researched constraints, there is hardly any transformative knowledge regarding how to activate land for edible cities.
The present study shows that land activation, whether active in the sense of (re)use of previously unused land or passive in the sense of access to existing edible plant stock and education measures to raise awareness regarding what is growing at one’s door step, is one of the two key action areas. In the case of PublicEC, it is evident that the existence of available urban land plays an important role in the expansion of publicly accessible areas to edible plants. Nevertheless, also PublicEC focused its transition activities to a greater extent on the key action area “civic participation”. In the case of DistrictEC, access to edible plants such as wild fruit trees is the basis for their educational activities such as guided district walks. This is not insignificant, since in some countries, the citizens’ access rights to green spaces as well as the existence of urban green spaces in general is constantly decreasing (Colding et al. 2020). The development and expansion of an edible city thus not only depends on the existence of urban green spaces in general but also on the ownership and access rights of the urban population to such land.
These constraints link to the debate on green and edible urban commons. By criticizing the current societal trajectories of neo-liberalism, urban green commons point to the fact that former public land is increasingly privatized, consequently limiting public access to land and its co-creation and co-management by public communities (Barthel et al. 2021; Colding et al. 2013). Thus, the key action area on “cooperative area activation” emphasizes the fact that activating land requires a cooperative approach that takes into account multiple stakeholders to foster edible urban commons (Scharf et al. 2019). In fact, the focus by PublicEC on the transition activity to activate stakeholders and networks, including the urban administration and private sector, proved to be a catalyst for land activation. In general, these findings substantiate other research on edible cities that have concluded that what is required is successful implementation of bottom-up and top-down engagement resulting in the sharing of resources and responsibilities in order to foster sustainable and green cities (Sartison and Artmann 2020; Säumel et al. 2019).
To enhance the agency of residents to support urban transformations, our results suggest that further key transition activities should be strengthened by both ECIs. Thus, what was striking in our results are the high pronunciations of transition activities aiming at high levels of stakeholder activation, information dissemination and practical support for stakeholders on the one hand, and the low level of empowerment of citizens for self-governance and self-organization and the comparatively low focus of the ECIs on issues of social cohesion and community building on the other hand. If we take into account the literature on transformative innovation and transition processes, empowerment is particularly important for successful social change processes (Avelino et al. 2020; Pel et al. 2020). Besides, marginalized groups in particular often have less access to green spaces (Geary et al. 2021; Rahman and Zhang 2018) as well as to nutritious food (Burns and Inglis 2007; Walker et al. 2010). This need for further efforts to enhance strategic measures for strengthening civic empowerment becomes even more important in terms of securing a long-term success of the ECIs beyond the funding of the City of the Future-project. Thus, we found that the activation and long-term involvement of volunteers was difficult according to the ECIs. According to interviewed actors in the case of PublicEC, better recognition and appreciation, increased visibility of voluntary activities initiated by the city administration, or even concepts for volunteering as an eligible activity are suggested to overcome this constraint.
All in all, by taking into account the fact that the availability of land is the basic precondition for realizing edible cities, and that there is a need for cooperation between civic society, urban planning and policy and economy, based on our findings we suggest that there is a need to link the key action areas of land activation with civic participation. Although our assessment framework addresses both key action areas, it did not include methodological efforts to explicitly expose the connections (cf. Glaas et al. 2019). Future research can therefore address the co-design and co-creation of edible urban commons as a specific key action area. In times of social-ecological crises, edible urban commons can challenge and re-shape narratives pertaining to land access, food production, and participation under the principles of justice and urban sustainability transformations (Ng 2020; Scharf et al. 2019).
Common and distinct patterns of process progression
Sustainability transition is a complex task, particularly for engaged urban citizens who have sincere aspirations to contribute to sustainability solutions but lack resources regarding how to systematically realize their transition experiments in a professional manner (Ehnert et al. 2018). Our framework not only provided a structure to systematically evaluate the process progression of both ECIs: through visual representation of the various phases we were able to also reveal commonalities and differences between the ECIs. By doing so, we were able to illustrate their dominant foci and lacking activities when initiating, innovating, and accelerating edible cities. The results clearly showed that both ECIs were focused on the innovating phase in which a range of transition activities were implemented. However, our analysis across the three phases showed that both ECIs had one transition activity which was consistently crucial: this was, for PublicEC, the activation of networks and stakeholders to foster civic participation, while for DistrictEC it involved strengthening of educational support in order to realize edible cities through the efforts of urban residents. Taking into account the diverse constraints, for example administrative and legal barriers and a lack of access to land or financial resources (Plassnig et al., 2022; Säumel et al. 2019), ECIs have to deal with strategic identification and weighting of important transition activities such as the two identified in our study. This can help to reduce the complexity of tasks and to use existing resources economically.
Ideally, such strategic considerations would be employed during the initiating phase. At the same time, edible city experiments profit from a learning-by-doing approach (Sartison and Artmann 2020; Plassning et al., 2022). Future research can compare transformative capacities of ECIs while also evaluating their degree of professionalization in terms of learning and effective targeting. In fact, also for PublicEC, the demand on professionalization was raised at the end of the project. Thus, personal conflicts among team members handicapped the collaboration and exposed the need to focus on common goals (Stadtgärten 2021). However, such conflicts did not come to light in our quantitative assessment. Interestingly, in particular for PublicEC, we could find only a few transition activities in the initiating phase which might explain a lack of common vision among ECI that could lead to such conflicts. The reason for underrepresentation of the initiating phase becomes visible by taking a closer look at its team beyond the mere City of the Future-project. In this regard, it became apparent that PublicEC was able to successfully build on previous activities in which the cooperation partners had already gained a number of positive experiences with representatives of the ECI (see also Stadtgärten 2021).
As a common pattern we found that the acceleration phase was less pronounced by both ECIs. However, since the overall aim of the phase of acceleration is to up-scale transition experiments through replication, financial security and embedding into institutional structures, we can argue that the underrepresentation of transition activities in this phase is crucial. Thus, there is the risk that the transition experiment will not be successful, over the long-term, in realizing the concept of edible cities. This finding can motivate transition teams to reflect more deeply on activities in this phase. However, the relatively short project funding of two years might also handicap such long-term strategies. Therefore, we also recognize the need that transdisciplinary research should be realized with a project duration of at least ten years (Ehnert et al. 2022; Reiß and Artmann 2023). This also allows one to more extensively explore the acceleration phase of ECIs and its success.
Although the funding of this project was quite limited in terms of its duration, the acceleration of all transition experiments was an overall target. Therefore, all ten transition experiments contributed to an online collection of observations and approaches regarding how to transform towards a city of the future. This information should inspire other cities, residents, business actors and researchers to learn from our experiential and practical knowledge (https://www.zukunftsstadt-dresden.de/werkstadtkoffer/). Like Glaas et al. (2019), we could not find a link concerning the extent to which such scientific assessments of process progression phases could increase the transformative capacity of ECIs. However, the reason for this in the end was that we had insufficient time to systematically reflect upon the (recognizable) results of this study. This was combined with the fact that the ECIs have also been busy trying to find follow-up funding for their project. In particular, in the end, the hurdles imposed on us by the current science system – a transdisciplinary reflection – proved to be an obstacle: with a relatively short project duration and the still prevailing focus of the scientific community on output, which is measured primarily in terms of scientific publications, it was not possible for our research team to generate in-depth reflection upon the results presented in this paper. This ties into the debate regarding the need for transformative science that considers transdisciplinary and collaborative reintegration of the gained scientific findings into societal practices (Lang et al. 2012; Loorbach et al. 2017).
Study limitations
By focusing on two ECIs that emerged in the context of the City of the Future process, the study has several limitations, especially with regard to the transferability of the results. The first challenge was in fact the competition that was held in the city of Dresden to find the best ideas that can support sustainability transformations. The funding of this transdisciplinary project enabled the initiatives to access financial resources for the project period of at least two years, which a large part of comparable civil society initiatives will not have available from the beginning. Thus, also other studies on edible cities showed that the success of such interventions depends primarily on highly motivated volunteers (Giacchè and Porto 2018). This may also explain why activities revolving around the funding of the initiative were rarely addressed in the initiating and innovating phase. However, the interviews show that such considerations increase towards the end of the project.
Apart from this, the project´s context may also be quite specific; thus, from our point of view, there could very likely be different results regarding the characteristics of the key transition activities in other non-western or less privileged contexts. For example, there was no evidence that those participating in the project (ECI members plus the large proportion of members and participants) relied on high-quality food. Thus, although the ECIs promoted access to high-quality local food as one of the benefits of edible cities, no concrete references to specific needs for healthy food were found in the data. Future research could extend our study to ECIs in countries of the global south or in neighborhoods with a less privileged population. For example, in Cuba the importance of urban agriculture increased after the crisis in the 1990s, and therefore different measures by the government were implemented in terms of land activation and civic participation. In the context of land activation, a national program was implemented that supported people getting access to land for urban food production. In the context of civic participation, the Cuban Ministry of Agriculture promoted agricultural store consultancies who provided technical advice and products to urban residents for farming and gardening activities (Plassnig et al. 2022). This shows the need for future studies to carefully reflect and eventually adapt our specific key action areas and transition activities to local framework conditions.
The application of the developed framework to the specific case studies of PublicEC and DistrictEC revealed that common and differing patterns between the ECIs, key action areas and progress procession phases could be visualized with the Florence Nightingale chart. In particular, a breakdown of the individual key transition activities can be an important first step towards capturing the lacking and/or dominating strategies by the ECIs across the three phases. However, this kind of representation lacks details involved in revealing the specific types of responses by the ECIs and its experienced drivers and constraints (cf. Glaas et al., 2019). It is only by including the specific activities associated with each key transition activity bundle that we can deeply shed light on why and how certain activities are pronounced. Therefore, it would be worth considering how a presentation of the specific ECI-activities would be possible, as this seems particularly rich in substance for concrete content-related discussions. For instance, with its focus on transition activities on educating residents, the focus of DistrictEC is exclusively on horizontal information dissemination addressing civil society actors – there was not a single activity found that points to information dissemination in the direction of the city administration. In contrast, PublicEC with its focus on activating stakeholders and networks addressed not only a horizontal but also a vertical dissemination of information. This ECI put much effort into innovating and accelerating their ideas through horizontal and vertical cooperation. PublicEC has activated a total of eight edible areas within the Dresden urban area for civic use and has undertaken a range of new plantings to increase the degree of edible plants in the urban area. Numerous self-organized groups continue to exist after the end of the project period and, therefore, the activated urban edible areas are still maintained by citizens, which can be explained by also taking into account the various types of network activities. Thus, a successful acceleration of edible cities includes not only an approach to up-scaling in the sense of reaching more people. Rather, approaches of scaling across (i.e. implementing edible cities in various sectors) and scaling soft (i.e. networking and alliance building) are also crucial for mainstreaming edible cities (Plassnig et al. 2022).
Conclusions
In this paper, we have presented a framework for capturing and systematizing the myriad activities of transition initiatives that are committed to the concept of the edible city. The identification of key action areas (civic participation and cooperative area activation) and its related key transition activities proved to be helpful when applied to the two case studies PublicEC and DistrictEC based on the example of the transdisciplinary real-world laboratory City of the Future 2030 + Dresden (Germany) in order to gain structured insight into common and distinct patterns of ECIs. Similar to the broader approach of Glaas et al. (2019), this framework can help to evaluate process progressions of initiating, innovating, and accelerating edible cities by making it possible to record and discuss how pronounced the activities of initiatives active in this field are and where improvements or interventions may be necessary for a successful process.
In methodological terms, it became apparent that, in particular, presentation of the results using the Florence Nightingale graph enabled a quick grasp of which key action areas and phases of process progression were particularly underpinned by the groups and which areas might need further attention. In general, we found that the level of activity is highest in the key action area of citizen participation, but that the aspects of inclusion and empowerment of citizens are still, comparatively, being neglected. We suggest thereby that transition experiments related to “civic participation” and “cooperative area activation” must be approached together in order to foster urban edible commons. To secure a successful realization of urban edible commons, the visualization of transition activities in terms of its process progression with a Florence Nightingale chart can provide common ground for transdisciplinary discussions in terms of prioritizing important responses from its initiation up to its acceleration for a city of the future. In the end we conclude that, in the face of the intensifying social-ecological crises linking urban ecology research with transformation science, it is meaningful to explore how we can transform towards sustainable cities as major pillars for a flourishing life on Earth.
Acknowledgements
We kindly thank the interviewees for their time and insights. We also thank Stefanie Klein and Maike Hering for their formal support of this study.
Declarations
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
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