What Real Life Interventions teach us about changing urban food systems

Changing how a city feeds itself might sound straightforward on paper. In practice, it looks a little different. As FoodCLIC enters its final year, eight Living Labs across Europe are currently implementing 32 Real-Life Interventions (RLIs). These practical, on-the-ground actions are tested in real settings to improve food environments and food systems and to generate evidence that can inform policies and planning. From social food prescriptions and community kitchens to school gardens, food hubs or policy roundtables, plenty has been achieved and much has been learned. But alongside the wins, there were also barriers worth talking about. The obstacles our Living Labs ran into are not just matters of local context. They are the structural conditions anyone trying to transform a food system will meet.

Who is in charge?

Governance fragmentation is a widely shared structural obstacle across the Living Labs. In Berlin, for example, responsibilities for food-related policies are shared among district, municipal, regional, and federal levels, which requires coordination across levels to address complex issues such as food poverty. In Brașov, political priorities shifted due to leadership transitions, which affected continuity and decision-making. Their response has been to build something that outlasts the political weather: Brașov’s Food Policy Network, created in one of their RLIs and now over 50 members strong, is one such anchor structure that holds even when changes in the political landscape occur.

When the rules don't match

A second shared barrier is the mismatch between how civil society or community organisations and public institutions operate administratively. This gap produces challenges on the ground:

• Small organisations can't easily pre-finance projects;
• Municipalities can't post-finance them;
• The Brașov Living Lab hit procurement delays;
• Lisbon found its ambitions outpacing the time available.

None of this gets solved by good intentions alone. What helps is naming the mismatch early and scoping realistically, patiently, and usually together with others. Several Labs found that allies make the difference: Barcelona, for example, linked up with sister projects rather than doing it alone.

Reaching the people you haven't reached yet

The third challenge is expanding the RLIs’ reach beyond stakeholders who are already aware and motivated. As Lucca’s team put it, the hardest part isn't engaging the already converted, but "shaping local actions that combine immediate aid with long-term empowerment." Their school food education programme, now in 28 classes, is one answer. In Lisbon, community spaces activated through the Community Oven and Kitchen RLI have become widely used hubs, yet engaging civil society in more formal reflection moments proved difficult. In Amsterdam, a neighbourhood intervention aimed to link community meals, food gardens and a cooperative into a city-district network failed because the networks were too fragile to hold. Acknowledging failure is itself what the Living Lab considers a lesson. As Amsterdam’s team pointed out, the struggle is worth it and the interventions are the train ride through the food system, rather than the destination. The interventions serve as a vehicle that makes the process and learning about food system transformation in our cities possible.

Guiding the way forward

Through the interventions, practitioners and researchers gain experience of what food system transformation looks like in practice: what works, what changes and what needs rethinking. Reflecting on failures is, by itself, a precondition for learning about what might work better. The thing that all Living Labs have in common, after four years, is a stubborn willingness to keep learning and working on those conditions, by tackling one barrier at a time.

This article was written by Wiebke Beushausen and Leliah Karbe

Publishing date: 5 June 2026