Creative Food Cycles: A Cultural Approach to the Food Life-Cycles in Cities

The new contemporary multi-city needs the landscape as a proactive eco-systemic infrastructure in order to rethink the whole food system, from the design of public spaces to domestic spaces. In this direction, Creative Food Cycles (CFC) is an EU project that, according to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), addresses the topic of food as a cross-cutting factor and powerful accelerator toward the co-design of sustainability in cities. Design culture today has begun to question and innovate production, distribution, and recycling models of food cycles. In the post-consumption and disposal phase illustrated herein, making the most of food means conceiving waste as a resource for the creation of new sustainable materials or prototypes. The concept of food waste and food losses has been shown to be not only a topic at the center of the debate but also a powerful tool for raising awareness of sustainable development at the community level. The CFC actions shown here were developed with the objective of persuading consumers to change their behaviors, while at the same time exploring cultural and social perceptions. With the aim of making cities more sustainable, this paper describes tools to engage different stakeholders, such as architects, product designers, and citizens, from a cultural point of view. The ongoing research has turned in the end into an educational campaign and an open platform where prototypes, new materials, and products are developed as inspiration for change.