Co-Creating
Europe's Urban
Food Future
UrbanFood
About UrbanFood
UrbanFood is a Horizon Europe project reimagining cities as active drivers of healthier, more inclusive, and climate-resilient food systems. Through six Urban Food Living Labs across Europe, citizens, researchers, municipalities, SMEs, and community organisations co-create and test innovative solutions that combine sustainable food production, citizen engagement, digital technologies, and participatory governance. By transforming cities into real-world innovation hubs, UrbanFood empowers communities to build more resilient, sustainable, and equitable food futures.
Our Approach
UrbanFood combines four key pillars:
Knowledge & Education
Building food literacy, nutrition awareness, and practical skills for sustainable food systems.
Urban Food Innovation
Testing innovative urban farming solutions, including vertical farming, rooftop greenhouses, community gardens, and emerging agri-tech approaches.
Social Co-Creation
Engaging citizens, vulnerable groups, public authorities, researchers, and local businesses in designing solutions together.
Digital Food Ecosystems
Developing citizen-centred digital tools that support knowledge sharing, local food exchange, urban food production, and evidence-based decision-making.
Digital Solutions
- UrbanFoodBot, an AI-powered advisory assistant
- UrbanFood Marketplace, supporting local food exchange and sharing
- UrbanFood Knowledge Hub, providing educational resources and training materials
- UrbanFood Data Management Suite, enabling data-driven monitoring and decision-making
UrbanFood Living Labs
UrbanFood’s Living Labs are real-life innovation spaces where citizens, municipalities, researchers, businesses, schools, and community organisations work together to shape more sustainable urban food systems. Each UFLL combines one or more innovative cultivation systems tailored to local needs and urban contexts, creating real-world environments for experimentation and learning.
The cultivation systems demonstrated in each UFLL provide the foundation for testing sustainable food production solutions, while the Living Labs themselves support a much broader transformation. Across the six demonstration cities, participants will co-create new approaches to food production, community engagement, education, healthy lifestyles, and urban regeneration through hands-on training, workshops, masterclasses, citizen science activities, community events, and knowledge exchange programmes.
By combining technological innovation with social innovation and participatory governance, the UrbanFood Living Labs will strengthen local capacity, generate practical knowledge, and develop solutions that can be adapted and replicated by cities across Europe.
Partners
