Abstract
The vision of the edible city revives lost urban food traditions and gains global recognition for fostering community, democracy, and participatory urban dynamics, now framed as urban food commons. Despite diverse local contexts, urban food initiatives face recurring challenges in funding, land access, and institutional integration, which we analyze through co-creation processes in six Living Labs, using semi-structured interviews to explore team dynamics, working methods, and outcomes, offering lessons to guide future edible city solutions. Through qualitative analysis of interviews with participants, we identify key factors influencing the success and effectiveness of co-creation. The findings demonstrate the transformative potential of co-creation while, at the same time, highlighting obstacles such as power imbalances, “projectification” effects, scalability issues, and representation gaps. Co-creation was found to foster trust, collaboration, and innovative solutions, although high expectations sometimes led to frustration. We also found that social entrepreneurs played a pivotal role, though broader societal engagement remained limited. Conflicts often emerged as both challenges and opportunities for joint learning. Our findings suggest that, despite its complexity, co-creation can empower communities and support pathways toward more sustainable urban transformation through collective action and innovation. We conclude by offering insights for future co-creation initiatives, emphasizing the importance of inclusive governance, continuous reflection, and integrating Living Labs into stable institutional frameworks.
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Acknowledgements
This research has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under grant agreement No. 776665. We thank all participants and our EdiCitNet research team members for fruitful discussions on our adventure to co-create meaningful steps towards making our cities edible. We thank Amal Chatterjee for improving our English.
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I.S. Conceptualization; Funding acquisition; Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Data curation; Formal analysis; Resources; Supervision; Validation; Writing – original draft. S.L. Investigation; Methodology; Project administration; Visualization; Writing – review & editing; M.P., K.R.-K., N.A.D., S.K., E.E.I. and E.H. Investigation; Methodology; Visualization; Writing – review & editing; S.K. and N.P. Writing – review & editing.
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Säumel, I., Pettit, M., Reichborn-Kjennerud, K. et al. People drive or stop transitions: Lessons learned on co-creating Edible Cities. npj Urban Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00359-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42949-026-00359-4
