Barbara Ribeiro

The Epicurious Garden is a public, government-led garden where anyone can help themselves with freshly harvested herbs, fruits and vegetables free of charge and without being asked to work on the land. The Epicurious Garden occupies 1500 m2 in the South Bank Parklands, at the heart of Brisbane, and is funded by the State Government. This article presents insights coded from two weeks of on-site observations and 19 interviews with implementation and management stakeholders, and visitors interviewed on-site, drawing attention to the multiple coded benefits of this government-led initiative. The insights include the benefits perceived by visitors that also informed the implementation vision and its successful funding allocation, namely: i) teaching children and adults about food; and ii) the carefully manicured maintenance of the aesthetically appealing productive landscape that attracts approximately 4000 visitors daily. The conclusion signals opportunities for other local councils to take leadership in offering food as a public service.

This action research project transformed a former bowling green into a public, inclusive, edible landscape in Waharoa, Aotearoa-New Zealand, where everyone is welcome to help themselves to fruits and vegetables free of charge and without being asked to work on the land. This 400 m2 Living Lab (LL) differs from community gardens, which are increasingly seen as privatising public land. The LL involved multi-stakeholder cooperation (government, community, and academia) and produced benefits that research participants perceived as transition pathways to more nutritious dietary choices, health education, and reduced criminality in a socially deprived region. The analyses of interviews, observations, and pollinator surveys conducted at the Waharoa LL (which confirmed that 14 visiting species were drawn by the LL) were coupled with insights from prior scholarship to put forward an approach to regenerative placemaking that articulates human and non-human perspectives and serves a planetary purpose combining human health and biodiversity benefits.

This article presents a heuristic framework to help respond to gaps in knowledge construction in sustainability transitions. Transition theory publications highlight concerns ranging from contentious understandings of sustainability to the need for generalisable conceptual frameworks around how place specificity matters in transitions. The heuristic presented here is a flexible framework for developing place-dependent narratives of sustainability transitions grounded in investment choices. The sustainability buckets development resulted from the abduction and retroduction methods. It was also underpinned by a praxis-oriented mechanism from business ('strategic investment buckets'), a transition theory conceptual framework ('the multi-level perspective'-MLP), and a social sciences heuristic ('sustainability cultures'). The sustainability buckets resulted from synthesising the critical literature with empirical findings drawn from two case studies in New Zealand. The heuristic proved helpful to navigate, organise, and code meanings and understandings of sustainability in the New Zealand agri-food context. It also helped facilitate dialogue with research participants from different backgrounds, such as government and business. The heuristic was designed to transform, remaining fit for purpose as transitions evolve. This article suggests the sustainability buckets could be used to enable investment opportunities for upscaling, reproducing, and transplanting transitions happening in distinct sectors and high-level systems.

This article wrestles with the theoretical complexity of fostering food sustainability transitions in metropoles. It pays attention to how urban food forestry networks cultivated in parks may represent a critical part of these transitions, by providing a mechanism for urban peoples to reconnect with food processes while enhancing biodiversity and ecosystem services. The work considers this crucial topic, both theoretically and empirically, in two steps. First, a brief overview of utopian models and the critical literature grounds the discussion of the proposed regenerative place-making model. Second, the work weaves considerations regarding a utopian model of urban food forestry network, by conceptualising Urban Living Labs (ULLs) as flexible nodes of articulation. The work concludes that the key to unlocking this model's potential for replication and transplantation to distinct localities lies as much in the multiple values entailed by the proposed intervention as it does in its flexible nodes of articulation.