Food and Cities

Food and 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.  

Portrait photo of Håkan Jönsson. Photo: Marianne Persson.

Meet the Food and Cities coordinator: Håkan Jönsson

Håkan Jönsson is a guest professor and coordinator at SLU. A former chef turned ethnologist, he studies how cities shape our food habits, the social aspects of eating, and how urban knowledge of food production can strengthen sustainability and resilience.

A group of people selling vegetables. Photo.

Food and Cities Stories

Meet people working with Food and Cities at SLU.

Colorful illustration of an urban environment

Securing food in the cities of the future

New risks, new legislation and new forms of collaboration raise the question: how can municipalities, regions and food system actors act to make Sweden more resilient in times of crisis? Read the summary of the latest webbinar in the Urban Landscapes webinar-series.

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

From Basement to Kitchen (Från källare till kök) is a project that aims to develop new methods for property owners and urban planners to create innovative areas by reusing existing environments, fostering social meeting places, and increasing residents’ self-sufficiency.

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.

Food is a social lubricant

In most wealthy countries, there is an unfortunate polarization between those who advocate large-scale, global systems and those who advocate small-scale, local ones. Parallel systems must be allowed to exist side by side if we are to achieve real robustness in the food system.

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.