THESys Project
Urban foraging is the practice of collecting plants and mushrooms growing spontaneously in parks, forests, gardens and other green spaces within and around cities. People forage for many different reasons: to gather food, spend time outdoors, connect with nature, maintain cultural traditions, share knowledge, or simply enjoy being attentive to their surroundings. Surveys in cities such as Vienna and Berlin suggest that urban foraging is more widespread than is often assumed. Yet, while interest in urban foraging is growing, it is still rarely considered in discussions about sustainable cities and urban food systems.
Urban foraging can also be viewed in very different ways. For some, it is a meaningful, healthy and sustainable way of engaging with urban nature; for others, it raises concerns about damage to green spaces, biodiversity or conflicts over the use of public spaces. These different perspectives point to broader questions about how urban nature is valued and managed, whose knowledge and practices are recognised, and who gets to shape the future of urban green spaces.
Urban foraging and values
Funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) through the WEAVE programme, the project Plural Values of Urban Foragingscapes in Edible Cities (PLUVUF) explores how people value, experience and engage with urban foraging. We are interested in how values emerge through everyday practices and relationships between people, plants, food and urban environments, and how these values are experienced, negotiated and enacted in different contexts. The project brings together the perspectives of foragers, urban planners, park managers and other public authorities to examine different perspectives on urban foraging, where tensions and inequalities emerge, and how these shape the ways urban foraging is understood, governed and practiced.
Weaving diverse ways of knowing and doing: imagining possible futures
We work across four European cities, combining ethnographic research, interviews, surveys, photovoice, art-based workshops and foresight workshops. These approaches help us attend to the different forms and motivations of urban foraging, and to the knowledges, practices and relationships through which people engage with plants used as food and urban green spaces. Art-based workshops create spaces for creative expression, dialogue and knowledge co-production, while foresight workshops invite participants to envision possible futures of urban foraging and edible cities. We pay attention to diverse life and migration trajectories, and to the different traditions, experiences and ways of knowing and doing that shape these relationships and the futures people imagine and make possible.
Project Team
PIs: Dr. Isabel Díaz Reviriego (IRI THESys) and Prof. Christoph Schunko (BOKU University)
Postdoc: Anjoulie Brandner (BOKU University)
Doctoral researcher: Carlo Scheuermann (BOKU University)
Project Partner
BOKU University – Institute of Organic Farming, Working Group “Knowledge Systems and Innovation”
LandFoodInfrastructure & Energy
