The FoodCLIC project (2022-2027), aims to contribute to urban food environments that make healthy and sustainable food available, affordable and attractive to all citizens, including deprived and vulnerable groups. The project does so through creating strong science-policy-practice interfaces across eight European city-regions (45 towns and cities). The backbone of such interfaces is provided by Food Policy Networks. FoodCLIC supports these food policy networks to establish living labs as virtual and physical spaces for members of the food policy networks to understand the food system and co-design, implement, analyse and evaluate real-life interventions that aim to build a policy-relevant evidence-base through learning-in-action. In addition to realising actual changes in food environments, real-life interventions will help to uncover barriers to, and facilitators of, scaling processes and to identify innovative business models, investment schemes and conducive market conditions and land use plans.
Activities are informed by an innovative conceptual framework (the CLIC), which emphasises four desired outcomes of food system integration: sustainability co-benefits, spatial linkages, social inclusion and sectoral connectivities. Capacity-building and direct support for intensive multi-stakeholder engagement (including deprived and vulnerable groups) enable policy actors and urban planners across city-regions to develop continuously evolving integrated urban food policies and render planning frameworks food-sensitive.
FoodCLIC has six objectives that, together, are contributing to the realization of the project’s overall aim and vision:
1. To map urban food systems, policies and actions and analyze good practices in terms of integration, with a special focus on urban food environments and short supply chains.
2. To develop a reflexive monitoring framework and guidelines to help planners and policy-makers to understand the range of barriers to, and opportunities for, interventions that enhance urban food environments and the urban food system
3. To mobilize a wide range of food system actors across the SPPI and build their capacity to actively contribute to the development of integrated food policies and food-sensitive planning frameworks.
4. To develop, implement, monitor, evaluate and redevelop evidence-based integrated urban food policies and planning frameworks that realize food environments able to deliver co-benefits in terms of health, climate, circularity, inclusion and the empowerment of communities.
5. To build a pan-European knowledge base for evidence-based integrated urban food policies and food-sensitive planning frameworks, including a range of implementation actions.
6. To strengthen existing and create new networks of cities and towns.
