Tackling the food system — design, community, and agriculture
The climate and biodiversity crises are an existential threat to our food security: from the impact on the environmental conditions needed to pollinate crops, to soil degradation reducing the nutrients needed for our food to grow. These effects are experienced globally — not only from rising sea levels and extreme temperatures forcing farming communities to migrate to urban areas — but also through the hazardous risks of widespread crop loss from disease and pests due to relentless monoculture. The impacts of these go beyond the provision of specific foods such as cocoa, coffee, tea, and fruit and cause life-threatening starvation for people across the planet.
On top of this, our current food system is a significant contributor to climate change: between 1/4 and 1/3 of the world’s current landmass is used by agriculture and forestry (IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land). Transitioning to a net-zero food system and addressing biodiversity loss will require significant behaviour changes both in how and what we consume, but also how we produce it. These changes include increasing local food production, diet changes, and equitable job transitions that ensure key actors in the food supply chain are visible.
Food security is an urgent issue for the United Kingdom. The UK Climate Risk Briefing has shown how climatic changes and extreme weather will impact soil health and agricultural productivity. ‘Even though warming temperatures may appear to present some opportunities for British agriculture due to longer growing seasons, other factors such as water scarcity may then become a risk factor to crops. It’s no surprise then that the latest Carbon Budget, produced by the UK’s Climate Change Committee identifies two key food-related steps for achieving net-zero carbon emissions in the UK: diet change — reducing consumption of high-carbon meat and dairy products by 20% by 2030; and land and greenhouse gas removals — transformation in agriculture and the use of farmland. If we are to shift our food system to a regenerative model, design across scales and disciplines — from graphics on packaging to how we steward landscapes — will have a crucial role to play.
On December 21st, 2021, Design Council convened its third community of practice event with its Expert Network. The purpose of these sessions is to collectively explore current issues in designing for planet and to develop insight into how design can most effectively work to achieve net-zero by 2050. This summary shares our collective insight into how design can help to facilitate behaviour change, systemically challenge current food systems, and create more sustainable practices for food and agriculture.
Four perspectives on using design to support the transition to sustainable and regenerative food systems
Four experts from across the architecture, food design and community organising shared their perspectives on how we can design regenerative food systems.
Kathryn Timmins: Create inclusive spaces that muster dignity, teach key skills and increase food access for communities
Kathryn Timmins is Principle Policy Officer for Regeneration at the Greater London Authority (GLA) and believes in the importance of design and the built environment professions to make spaces, and things, that we are proud to use and share (see, for example, ‘Good Growth by Design’ from the GLA). Engagement with communities and context is crucial to allow for good design, especially when aiming to influence behaviour change, challenge stigma around access to food, support sustainable food cultures, and empower communities with kitchen skills. For Timmins, the following projects (all commissioned or supported by the GLA) illustrate how design can create spaces, buildings, and systems that re-introduce food into urban areas and ensure the needs of some of the most vulnerable residents in these areas are met.
Wandsworth Community Food Bus, Wandsworth, JKA Architects
The Wandsworth Food Bus was designed for chronically underserved areas in Wandsworth and works in partnership with Be Enriched and Feeding Britain. The project aims to tackle food deserts (where an area lacks access to affordable, healthy, and fresh food). Residents can select responsibly sourced food at an affordable price, which, in return, eases pressure on household budgets.
The design of the space differs from that of a food bank. Aside from being physically different (in this case a bus) — the design helps alleviate the stigma felt around using a food bank through providing dignity in choice, healthy food, and a space that doesn’t feel institutional. The bus relies on partnerships with organisations that have a deep understanding of local needs and has space for wrap-around services such as debt advice and mental health programmes.
Nourish Hub, Hammersmith and Fulham, RCK Architects
The Nourish Hub was designed to support learning about healthy eating, teach essential food skills, and provide social infrastructure to connect diverse communities using food. The Nourish Hub works in partnership with UK Harvest and the London Borough of Hammersmith & Fulham. Hammersmith and Fulham is an area undergoing significant regeneration, in which the design and development of the Nourish Hub aimed to ensure that the community are included and felt heard within a time of transformative change.
“It’s about the design of the space, but also about the design of the process. It’s about where it is and who it’s for.”
The space is flexible and mixed-use, replacing a vacant post office. The design process focused on community engagement, using cooking classes and branding workshops to generate ideas on the spatial layout and the visual identity. The journey of the design process and resulting spatial qualities of the Nourish Hub have created a flexible space that encourages the formation of positive relationships with food.
Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, Lambeth, Feilden Fowles Architects
The Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses is a community-led initiative that works to grow and distribute food to increase access for the residents of Lambeth. Construction has just started on the space.
The architects were briefed to create a design that opened the space, to create a flexible environment for education on food growing and workshops for a variety of audiences and programmes. The architecture uses natural materials to provide a warm, dry environment that support the needs of the space in the simplest manner. Design, in this scenario, has created a space that facilitates learning and exploration about the food system, helping residents to understand more about provenance and ecology.
Glengell Wharf Garden, Peckham
Glengell Wharf is a community garden in Peckham that was created in 2011. The use of design was tackled differently for Glengell Wharf, differing from traditional garden design. The community did not want clean raised beds, but a wild landscape with design at its heart, with less rigid outcomes. The space caters for those who want to be within a less formal or manicured landscape, allowing for excitement, learning and play. Glengell Wharf provides a playful, wild environment that contrasts to the uniformity of built-up urban areas, highlighting the need to provide natural landscapes like this within towns and cities.
Michael Crilly and Andy Haddon on creating a sustainable business model with nourishing food at its heart
Michael Crilly, a Senior Lecturer for the Architecture and Built Environment Department at Northumbria University, came across Andy Haddon through his research on the transformation of food systems. Andy Haddon founded the first Big River Bakery in Tyneside (northeast of the UK). A second bakery is now located in Teesside.
The aim of the bakery is to provide healthy, local food that is affordable and available to everyone in the northeast, particularly, in areas that are not considered affluent. The project has received global recognition, most recently featuring on the BBC’s Hairy Bikers food programme. The bakery is split into two, with one side of the building a training space, and the other side a retail frontage with a café (the bakery).
The Big River Bakery focuses on systems-thinking and process design, identifying how sustainable income streams can be implemented, moving food bank organisational structures away from traditional grant dependence. The bakery works in a ‘quadruple helix’ approach: public sector engagement, research, commercial, and community.
Haddon’s view on the need for change in behaviours towards food consumption is to break down the overwhelming complexity of addressing climate change into bitesize chunks — making the impact of climate change relevant and engaging by starting local, from the soil to the table. For example, the bakery has grown the first wheat in Tyneside within the last 200 years for its bread production.
A key aspect of the approach taken by the bakery is to not only look at food sustainability, but also social sustainability. The team behind Big River is ‘using food to create system change’. By working with a trading model, and not relying solely on grant funding, the bakery business model can be applied elsewhere and scaled as a social franchise, which allows more sustainable practices to be financially resilient and adopted across the country.
Eike Sindlinger & Sowmya Parthasarathy on designing food systems back into our urban spaces and creating opportunity from crisis
Architects Eike Sindlinger and Sowmya Parthasarathy offered insight into some of Arup’s work on food system transformation. Arup has historically worked on designing food in the built environment, starting from implementing allotments and community gardens in projects, to vertical farming using hydroponics. More recently, the organisation has been focussing on recognising the importance of productive landscapes, healthy soils, farming, and its relationship with carbon emissions.
“We can’t transition out of our need for food.”
Sindlinger’s view is that design’s key challenge in urban areas is to make the food system visible. The process of farm to place has been made invisible due to the efficiency of supply chains and rapid industrialisation. The idea of food insecurity is therefore distant for a city dweller, in which we fail to appreciate our dependence on food products coming from rural areas. For example, when we design buildings, urban areas, or make masterplans, we consider water, energy, and transport — we do not factor in food production, distribution, or consumption. This highlights the greater paradox, that cities are built on our most arable land. There are, however, examples of places where food has been designed back into cities. For example, Singapore Edible Garden City has created roof gardens using edible native plant species.
Sindlinger and Parthasarathy offered ‘5 ideas for London’ that ensure that healthy citizens support a biodiverse and regenerative planet:
· Food citizens: narrowing the gap between producer-consumer and empowering people to make better choices, to create a fairer distribution of value across the system.
· Localisation: activating smaller supply chain loops by localising production, distribution, and processing. Creating a connected web of facilities for urban growing, distribution, and recycling to support the ultimate circular economy.
· High-tech to natural: supporting agrochemical-free food production, and the growth of bio-diverse foods in controlled environments.
· Food as medicine: changing the perception of food from being a calorific commodity, to a personalised product that nourishes the human biome.
· Diversification: embracing diversity through micro-production to make a more resilient food system.
Rob Maslin on using data-based evidence to design equitable global agricultural supply chains
Food systems touch on every UN Sustainable Development Goal. This illustrates the importance to design effectively for food systems with equitable investment, just actions, supply chain traceability and transparency. The need for this is highlighted through the shocking statistic that 79% of the worlds’ poorest people live in rural areas and are largely dependent on agriculture (World Bank). These areas are disproportionately affected by climate change — lower yields require an increase in the size of farms, therefore, more deforestation. Maslin is working to break the cycle between deforestation and poverty by creating equitable supply chain transactions. Maslin’s view is that design plays a role in food system data transformation: to encourage the uptake of ethical tech uses, align values with perceived value, create governance structures around technology, and lead a conditional optimum.
For example, the 2018 Colco project fosters better decisions at the farm level to increase productivity and reduce environmental damages in Colombia. The project provides data-based supply chain services, e.g., a weather prediction application for farmers. There, however, remains issues around literacy, data maturity and tech maturity within this programme.
Another project, Forest Mind (2022), tackles the retailer end of the supply chain, aiming to make transparent where products are coming from for retailers in the UK. Through tracing the commodities to the geographical area of production and monitoring the area of interest, the project can report events of deforestation and create a feedback loop. There are issues with traceability, system change theory, accountability, and cost with this project.
Maslin’s research highlights how technology can be utilised with a ‘human lens’, to make each step of the supply chain (from farm to plate) visible. This ensures that customers pay a fair price for nutritious food, and farmers receive a fair, ethical wage for produce that supports biodiverse ecosystems.
How can designers work to create sustainable and regenerative food systems?
1) Adopt a systemic approach: design is relevant at all scales of the food system (from packaging to infrastructure design), and further, designers can connect across all scales of the food system. Implementing design-led approaches can identify wider actors that sometimes go unseen, as in the case of Forest Mind. A systemic design approach can highlight interconnectivity between policies and initiatives, for example, with CPULs (Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes). You can read more in Design Council’s Systemic Design Framework and System Shifting Design report.
2) Policy implementation: specific policies at a Local Authority level in relation to land use, allotments, land designation and smaller schemes (e.g., orchards) will support built environment professionals and designers in creating space for peri-urban and fringe farming. Policy at a national level (e.g., in the NPPF, design or building standards) would give Local Authorities and built environment professionals the confidence to build local policies and Supplementary Planning Documents (SPDs) into Local Plans focusing on designated food production areas and/or spaces. This culture shift will prompt designers to respond to food-related policies in designing new developments and create environments that contribute towards the sustainable regeneration of urban areas.
3) Recognising context: designers can map the role of the wider place and the actors that influence urban and rural influence on food systems. Designers can also connect people and places through co-design, as seen in the Nourish Hub or Wandsworth Community Food Bus. Engaging with residents/communities is crucial to understanding how the food system is fundamental to city life and meeting needs.
4) Education/awareness: designers can empower residents, tooling them with the confidence, capacity, and skills to self-govern spaces using citizen assembly methods. For example, Cordon Bleu cookery school has a module on urban agriculture. Including heritage and history in food education is crucial — for example, food production during the war, and within diaspora communities.
5) Technology: designers adopt a ‘social lens’ when using technology within the food system (aka, using technology to engage people). For example, tracking food miles of produce, telling a narrative around the product and producer for consumers, and creating data-based, equitable supply chain transactions, as seen in the case of the Forest Mind and Colco project. OLIO, an app designed to redistribute leftover food at a cheaper price from bakeries, restaurants and cafes, is another great example of this.
Design Council will be publishing three case studies about OLIO (a mobile app designed to reduce food waste by facilitating food sharing), Mimica (a temperature-sensitive tag that indicates food freshness) and Growing Underground (a brand working to reshape farming by accelerating the transition to carbon negative approaches). Follow our social media (Twitter, Instagram) or sign up for our newsletter to be the first to read them 👀
Further Reading and Resources
Wandsworth Community Food Bus, Wandsworth, JKA Architects: mentioned in Timmins’ presentation (link here).
Nourish Hub, Hammersmith and Fulham, RCK Architects: mentioned in Timmins’ presentation (link here).
Brockwell Park Community Greenhouses, Lambeth, Feilden Fowles Architects: mentioned in Timmins’ presentation (link here).
Glengell Wharf Garden, Peckham: mentioned in Timmins’ presentation (link here).
Sitopia Urban Farm: an innovative social enterprise that grows food to advance social, environmental and health objectives, located in Greenwich, London (link here).
Sustain: a national alliance of organisations working together for a better system of food, farming and fishing (link here).
The Big River Bakery: mentioned in Haddon’s presentation (link here).
“How can cities implement local food production while targeting a sustainable future?” — a blog on the circular economy and sustainable food by ARUP (link here).
Singapore Edible Garden City — referenced in Sindlinger and Parthasarathy’s presentation (link here).
The Colco Project: referenced in Maslin’s presentation (link here).
Forest Mind: referenced in Maslin’s presentation (link here).
Provenance: an open-source software and framework that helps brands make shopper-facing social and environmental impact claims with integrity (link here).
Wood Green rooftop garden and new food-based identity: Wood Green High Road in the London Borough of Haringey has secured £200,000 funding through the High Streets for All Challenge programme to develop a new rooftop garden that will supply food and create jobs (link here).
Abundant Earth Coop: a worker’s coop based just outside of Durham city that practice permaculture, vegetable growing and crafts (link here).
Graceworks: a permaculture project based in Leicester that offers courses and training including gardening, permaculture, and aquaponics (link here).
