Report
Teaser, summary, work performed and final results
Periodic Reporting for period 2 - SHARECITY (SHARECITY: Assessing the practice and sustainability potential of city-based food sharing economies)
Teaser
With planetary urbanization fast approaching there is growing clarity regarding the unsustainability of cities, not least with respect to food consumption. Sharing, including food sharing, is increasingly being identified as one transformative mechanism for sustainable cities:...
Summary
With planetary urbanization fast approaching there is growing clarity regarding the unsustainability of cities, not least with respect to food consumption. Sharing, including food sharing, is increasingly being identified as one transformative mechanism for sustainable cities: reducing consumption; conserving resources, preventing waste and providing new forms of socio-economic relations. However, such claims currently rest on thin conceptual and empirical foundations. SHARECITY identifies and examines diverse practices of city-based food sharing economies, first determining their form, function and governance and then identifying their impact and potential to reorient eating practices. The research has four objectives: to advance theoretical understanding of contemporary food sharing economies in cities; to generate a significant body of comparative and novel international empirical knowledge about food sharing economies and their governance within global cities; to design and test an assessment framework for establishing the impact of city-based food sharing economies on societal relations, economic vitality and the environment; and to develop and implement a novel variant of backcasting to explore how food sharing economies within cities might evolve in the future. Providing conceptual insights that bridge sharing, social practice and urban transitions theories, SHARECITY has generated a typology of food sharing economies; an online interactive database of food sharing activities in 100 global cities; in-depth food sharing profiles of 7 cities from the contrasting contexts of USA, Australia and Germany, Greece, Spain, Ireland and Singapore; a sustainability impact toolkit to enable examination of city-based food sharing initiatives; and scenarios for future food sharing in cities. Conducting such frontier science SHARECITY will open new research horizons to substantively improve understanding of how, why and to what end people share food within cities in the 21st Century.
Work performed
Task A – Food sharing economies: Foundation building and framework development [Objectives 1 and 2]
Conceptual development of a food sharing typology has been developed and published in a SHARECITY Briefing Note (No.1) and a SHARECITY Working Paper (No.1) as well as being published in international peer reviewed journals and a Special Issue for Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society (2017):
• Davies, A.R. (2016) Typologies of Food Sharing. SHARECITY Working Paper No.1. Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
• Davies, A., and Weymes, M. (2017) SHARECITY Briefing Note 1: The SHARECITY100 Database, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
• Davies, A. R., Gray, M., Donald, B., Knox-Hayes, J. (2017) Sharing economies: Moving beyond binaries in a digital age, CJRES, 10(2) : 209-230
• Davies, A. R., Gray, M., Donald, B., Knox-Hayes, J. (2017) Sharing Economies? Theories, Practices and Impacts, CJRES, 10(2).
• Davies, A.R. and Legg, R. (2018) Fare Sharing: Interrogating the nexus of ICT, urban food sharing and sustainability, Food Culture and Society, 21(1), DOI:10.1080/15528014.2018.1427924
Additional conceptual development is ongoing with a book contract with Polity Press on Urban Food Sharing (due to be published in 2019) and a commission to write two further conceptual pieces with:
• Davies, A.R. (2019) Urban Food Sharing, Polity Press: Bristol.
• Davies, A.R. (2019) Sharing Economies. The International Encyclopedia of Human Geography, 2e, edited by Dr. Audrey Kobayashi
• Davies, A.R (2019) Routledge Handbook of Sustainable and Regenerative Food Systems, Editors Han Wiskerke Jessica Duncan and Michael Carolan
The matrix of food sharing was utilized in the construction of a database of food sharing initiatives in 100 cities. This database identified and enabled the analysis of more than 4000 initiatives across 100 cities in 44 countries and 6 continents. Initiatives were analysed according to what they shared, how they shared it, and what type of organisational structure and ICT they employed in order to share.
The motivation for creating SHARECITY100 was to make the landscape of food sharing in cities visible by mapping initiatives consistently across a large number of contexts. This helps demonstrate that the creative and innovative actions of individual initiatives are not isolated experiments, but part of a burgeoning body of activities seeking to reconfigure urban food systems.The SHARECITY100 database enables, for the first time, consistent analysis and identification of patterns and trends in ICT-mediated urban food sharing across cities, countries and continents. It is highly productive; creating a picture of the why, where, what and how contemporary food sharing takes place. Certainly, the diverse collection of food sharing initiatives documented provides a counter-balance to much of the sharing economies research which has tended to focus on a small number of high profile, for-profit enterprises which are using ICT to link up those with idling resources and capacity and those who wish to avail of it. The SHARECITY100 not only provides the foundation for more in-depth explanatory and comparative scholarly analysis, it also provides the bedrock on which connections and networks amongst and between sharing initiatives can be forged, and both nascent and active food sharers and those who seek to regulate the sharing of food can come together.An open access and interactive version of the SHARECITY100 database and map is hosted on the project website. The database has been viewed more than 4900 times from 86 countries since going live and was shortlisted as a finalist in the REFRESH Food Waste Solution Contest in 2017. The entire database was manually checked after one year and broken links corrected and inactive initiatives removed from the website. New initiatives are added as they are identified.
Two papers and a Working Paper have been published based on this phase of research and one Briefing Note for
Final results
Progress beyond the state of the art has been made at each stage of the research process:
1. SHARECITY has developed the first typology of contemporary urban food sharing and this has been published in itnernational peer-reviewed journals
2. The SHARECITY100 Database has dcumented, for the first time, the landscape of ICT_mediated urban food sharing internationally. This has led to international peer-reviewed journals and a highly visible platform for urban food sharing. The SHARECITY website has received 41,953 page views since it was established, the SHARECITY100 has been viewed 4900 times, from 86 countries. 206 of these views have been from 44 countries outside the database indicating interest in expanding coverage for this tool
3. The in-depth ethnogaphies have produced unprecented comparrative data from multi-sited ethnographies and will result in major publications (including a book and Special Issue)
4. The development of the first co-designed sharing sustainability toolkit is underway
5. The final phase focused on the governing the future of food sharing will commence towards the end of 2018 with a participatory event held in 2019
6. A low-carbon final event will provide the platform for communicating the cumulative results of the project
Website & more info
More info: http://sharecity.ie/.