The Urban Agriculture Consortium is excited to announce that a new phase of our work will start in autumn 2026.
The new ROOTED programme will promote and support the development of Landed Community Kitchens in eight countries across Europe, including the UK. This will build on a just-completed pilot project with Centre for Agroecology Water and Resilience (Coventry University) which introduced Landed Community Kitchens in eight amazing grassroots settings in the north of England. The pilot was supported by UAC, Farming the Future, Regather, the Real Farming Trust and the Community Supported Agriculture Network (CSA).
A Landed Community Kitchen* (LCK) is both a place, and a way of organising ourselves to meet our own needs for good food and connection. The central idea is that community kitchens and agroecological producers work together to bring good food into the kitchens, providing meals, training and connection at neighbourhood level while paying the producers a fair price. In this way, social eating (and community food processing) can support the livelihoods of growers who, with a more secure income, can invest more in restoring nature which supports long term food supply, which feeds the people through networks of community kitchens, which builds a demand and a market for producers and so on. A virtuous spiral.
Food used in LCKs can come from any local, sustainable food growing site – allotments, community gardens, CSAs and agroecological farms and market gardens. Use of surplus food is often part of a community kitchen’s model. A Landed kitchen will seek to decrease dependence on supermarket surplus and increase agroecological supply. Economic mechanisms and relationships such as pay what you can, enterprise stacking, food processing, training offers etc generate income for the kitchens. ROOTED will support local partners to look at 4 themes: Infrastructure, the ‘more-than-food’ work (wellbeing, belonging, political awareness etc), economic models, and policy, with the support of specialist researchers. LCK partners will learn from each other to develop their own ideas and interventions that suit their unique context, using their strengths to address challenges.
The ROOTED project***, funded through EU Horizon, will run from 2026 -2030 is all about communities designing and testing ideas and interventions based on their lived experience. The UK Living Lab is co-ordinated by the Urban Agriculture Consortium**, Coventry City Council and Granville Community Kitchen and Farm (South Kilburn, London). We look forward to many of the LCK partners from our first pilot becoming part of this research community and the Living Lab.
Core Goals
- Support local growers: Source food directly from small-scale, ecological farms to support their livelihoods.
- Design out food insecurity: Provide healthy, shared meals with dignity through new community-centred infrastructure and new economic ideas and relationships that are built to weather the present and future challenges in having a healthy food supply for all.
- Strengthen communities: Bring people from all backgrounds together to eat and cook, skill-share, build community wealth, build urban-rural and cross-class solidarity, and build the foundations of a local economy to meet our basic needs long term.
- Transform food systems: Create and normalise long-term, localised, healthy alternatives to harmful industrial food systems and the degradation, exploitation and waste they generate
*Landed Community Kitchens are one of the building blocks of Agroecological Urbanism. www.agroecologicalurbanism.com
**The Urban Agriculture Consortium was instigated in 2019 and is an informal collaboration of stakeholders and associates working to further common aims. UAC is project manged by Green Future Associates CIC.
***The ROOTED project is funded through the EU Horizon programme (Grant number 101288015),
Interested to know more?
Please email maddy@greenfuture.org.uk and see:
https://agroecologicalurbanism.org/
https://www.urbanfoodjustice.org/research-projects/landed-community-kitchens