Emerging Strands

These are some areas of collaboration that UAC is exploring with our partners:

  • Reimagining the Green Belt – watch the videos of our innovative 2023 pilot project in the Bristol/Bath greenbelt. Greenbelts are hot on the political agenda – but what voices do the urban and rural community have? Our green belts could become peri-urban generators of health, community wealth and bio-regional food security. Focussing on developing certain pillars of Agroecological Urbanism, planning policy and community visioning processes we want to expand this work across England. Funding applied for.
  • Landed Community Kitchens (LCKs) – social justice-based Kitchen-Farmer coalitions linking urban communities to their productive hinterland to end food poverty and build community. Building on an exploratory workshop in Leeds (Feb 2024), we are now working with Coventry University, the CSA Network, Real Farming Trust, and Regather (Sheffield) to expand and explore the LCK model. Funding applied for.
  • Allotments and beyond – pathways into local food resilience: from collective allotment governance, allotment CSAs, Public Common Partnerships, and land trusts to safeguard and manage new sites in perpetuity, glut huts, allotment kitchens and more. Building on accumulated experience and dialogues with partners. Funding needed.
  • Urban compost collectives – Networked neighbourhood composting infrastructure transforming urban household and business food waste into biologically complete living soils. Funding needed.
  • Supporting development of Farmstarts – incubator hubs training and mentoring new entrant farmers in peri-urban areas, working with local authorities & partners on the set up stage. Building on foundational work already completed.
  • Tiny Homes for land stewards – a new concept/model for how the problems of affordable housing, land stewardship, food provision and ecological restoration might be tackled together in and around cities: building on the Greenbelt project and lived experiences.
  • Telling a new story (cross cutting theme) – Communications and narrative: good healthy food is everyone’s right, responsibility and pleasure.