From plans to plates: how cities are transforming food systems from the ground up

What does it take to shift a city’s food system towards sustainability, resilience, and justice? Across Europe, the eight city-regions participating in FoodCLIC are finding out in real time by rolling up their sleeves and testing new ideas in the everyday spaces where food systems materialize: the neighbourhoods, markets, and institutions that feed their communities. But tackling systemic food challenges in complex urban environments is easier said than done. How can city-regions ensure that interventions are relevant, inclusive, and really meet the needs of residents? How can they move from pilot projects to long-term transformation of our food systems?

To support this journey, FoodCLIC has developed a set of Guidelines and Tools for Real-Life Interventions, a practical resource to help city-region teams turn ambition into action, while keeping communities at the heart of the process.

Co-creation, not consultation

At the core of the guidelines is a clear message: don’t just design food interventions for people; design them with people. That means involving communities, especially those experiencing food insecurity or exclusion, from the very beginning.

“To support power sharing, recruit more people with lived experience than professionals […] ensuring safe conditions for intercultural exchange and participation of people with lived experience of systemic marginalisation requires more care and hospitality” (p.15-16).

Each FoodCLIC city-region has built a “Living Lab”: a local partnership between practitioners, researchers, and actors that works together through a structured process. One of their concrete tasks: co-designing at least four concrete actions to improve urban food environments. These are grounded initiatives that must deliver a positive impact within two years and focus on real challenges identified by the community. At least half of them must specifically benefit vulnerable or food-deprived groups: school gardens in underserved areas, new delivery models for local produce, or pop-up community kitchens testing culturally inclusive menus. Beyond their setting, what makes these interventions “real-life” is their experimental nature. Living Lab Teams don’t pretend to have all the answers; they adapt as they go, learning what works and what needs adjustment. That’s where the next tool comes in.

Learning cycles

Implementing an intervention is one thing. Learning from it and adapting in real time is what makes change sustainable. That’s why FoodCLIC builds learning directly into the project cycle. City-region teams go through four six-month learning cycles, each with moments to plan, act, observe, and reflect. These “action-learning loops” help teams identify what’s working, what needs to shift, and how to build stronger partnerships along the way. This approach aims at stimulating reflexive thinking: acknowledging complexity, staying responsive and especially emphasizing the need for self-reflection, accountability and the sharing of lessons learned with the wider community.

Connecting local action with policy

Food interventions often struggle to be sustainably adopted due to limited connections with policymaking. FoodCLIC tackles this by creating communities of practice for local policymakers. These groups offer a space to reflect on early results, identify policy implications, and co-create strategies that can embed successful interventions into broader urban planning frameworks. A community of practice tends to stimulate interpersonal relationships, which in turn are reported as the primary enabler of successful engagements between policy and academia. When mutually supportive, respectful and trusting relations are established, actors are more likely to share different perspectives and new possibilities. The communities of practice are launched through shared learning sessions, and their design is tailored to local needs. They help ensure that what happens on the ground shapes how cities plan and govern their food systems.

One city, one table

Another useful approach in the kit is guidance on organizing a governance event: a moment to bring everyone together, from community leaders and food workers to municipal staff and national policymakers. These events allow participants to reflect on the interventions, celebrate wins, acknowledge challenges, and lay the groundwork for lasting cooperation. The format is flexible, but always participatory. The aim is to break down silos and build trust across sectors, cultivating relationships, aligning agendas, and recognizing food as a connector across health, climate, equity and the economy. The FoodCLIC guidelines value lived experience as much as data. They aim to centre vulnerable and food-deprived communities while working toward systems change. And they see setbacks not as a dead end, but as part of the learning curve. City-regions are complex, and food systems very much reflect such complexities. Through a structured, inclusive and adaptive approach using tools and approaches mentioned, FoodCLIC is offering a blueprint for how to make local food interventions stick, and how to make them matter.

This blog was written by Matteo Bizzotto, Senior Officer of Global Communications at ICLEI World Secretariat, based on the FoodCLIC publication Guidelines and tools for the real-life interventions

Publishing date: 18 March 2026