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.

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?

Apply for seed money

Researchers at SLU can apply for seed funding from Food & Cities to develop cross-disciplinary research that examines the systemic relationships between food systems and urban development.
Apply here

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.

A woman in the forest. Photo.

Food & Cities Stories

Meet people working with Food & Cities at SLU.

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.

News and updates

  • 2025-04-11

    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.”
  • 2025-04-11

    A new way to prioritize food issues

    Significant changes have occurred in the food system. The old local systems have started to strain as the systems become more global and complex. Now, we need new methods to secure food supply. One concept gaining increasing attention is food planning.
  • 2025-04-04

    Urban food production requires interdisciplinary collaboration

    Rooftop greenhouses can provide fresh, locally produced food in urban areas, reducing transportation, increasing food security, creating jobs, and enabling efficient recycling of heat, water, and nutrients. If designed correctly, they can also help mitigate overheating in urban environments.

Meet people working with Food & Cities at SLU

  • Food waste in Addis Ababa

    A little seed funding goes a long way! This project, led by Associate Professor Assem Abu Hatab at SLU, started with an application to SLU Urban Futures seed funding and resulted in a collaboration project in Addis Ababa looking at determinants of food waste amongst urban dwellers.

  • Visions for a sustainable food system at Alnarp’s Agroecology Farm

    On around 1200 sq/m of land at Alnarp campus, Alnarp Agroecology Farm grows vegetables and cultivates practical skills in farming in line with principles of agroecology.

  • Community gardens for health and urban biodiversity

    Vebjørn Egner Stafseng is a PhD student working on urban community gardens. These are initiatives where urban food gardening is carried out cooperatively, with aims of including a diversity of urban dwellers.

  • A warmer reception to new crops and forest-based products

    The impacts of climate change pose challenges and opportunities for the production of food across the world. Adan Martinez Cruz is investigating how Sweden can take advantage of climate change for the production of new types of agricultural, forest and aquatic products.

  • Where we live and what we eat

    Reliance on the global food-supply chain, particularly for urban areas that do not produce food locally, is laden with risk of disruption and delay. This project investigate a different way of thinking about how communities grow and consume food that is more self-sufficient.