Food and Cities

Food & Cities is a collaboration between SLU Future Food and SLU Urban Futures. The project communicates SLU’s existing research and aims to create new encounters between different disciplines and sectors. The project seeks to identify knowledge gaps and cross-disciplinary research questions and investigates how a long-term thematic focus on food and cities could be established at SLU.  

Why Food and Cities?

Rapid urbanization and growth of urban populations means that most people are living in cities, Therefore, the consumers and consumer culture whose decisions define how the food system may evolve are concentrated in urban areas.

Portrait photo of Håkan Jönsson. Photo: Marianne Persson.

Håkan Jönsson is the new coordinator for Food and Cities

Håkan Jönsson is the new coordinator for Food and Cities, an initiative to develop and communicate research and education at the intersection of food and city at SLU.

A woman in the forest. Photo.

Food & Cities Stories

Meet people working with Food & Cities at SLU.

Getting our Cities Right

See four speakers answer the question: From your perspective and background, what would be the three key ways to get our cities right?

From Basement to Kitchen

Från källare till kök (From Basement to Kitchen) is an innovation project that serves as a prototype - meaning a short, focused initiative to demonstrate change in society. The project aims to find a new method for property owners and urban planners to create innovative areas with new ways of using existing environments and contributing to social meeting places, while increasing the self-sufficiency of residents.

Research initiatives

See examples of SLU research initiatives within the subject area food and cities.
To the research initiatives
People putting food on plates. Photo.

School meals should be on the top of the political agenda

If we want to have healthy people, landscape and climates, schools are the right place to start.

Some people are walking around in a big greenhouse. Photo.

Urban food production: Rooftop greenhouses

Rooftop greenhouses can provide fresh and locally produced food as well as optimise land use and energy efficiency. An interdisciplinary collaboration at SLU has investigated if this is a way forward for urban food production in Sweden.

A man speaking with a pen in his hand. Photo.

A new way to prioritize food issues

What does it take to create a sustainable food system today? We need new methods to secure food supply and one concept gaining increasing attention is food planning.

Two people on an agricultural field with a drone. Photo.

Programmes and courses

At SLU, there are many educational programmes and courses that offer interdisciplinary learning on subjects relating to food and cities.