Project

“Grow your own food in the corridor of your building, reduce GHG (greenhouse gas) emission, the waste of food and energy and transportation costs! Improve your physical health by changing your eating habits and engage with your neighbours!”

The main goal of SmartFood project (https://smartfood.city/) is to provide a novel evidence-based socio-technological framework of sustainable food production and consumption towards the sustainable smart city of the future by engaging micro-local communities through novel in-house food self-production and households’ behavioural change of diet, for the purpose of improving health outcomes and reducing GHG emissions, waste of energy, improved social inclusion and greater citizen awareness.

SmartFood integrates state of the art interdisciplinary research of urban food consumption and production, with a novel approach to co-creation of insect- and vege-based, nutritious foods, without using any soil or land, while exploiting the locally available rainwater and solar energy for all year long sustainable and safe food production in corridors of urban blocks of flats.

SmartFood aims to make a significant contribution towards fulfilling the long-term vision of cities of the future, where switching to sustainable food consumption and production patterns increases healthy eating habits, reduces reliance on food retailing, reduces food waste and strengthens communal connection in urban buildings.

As outcome of these activities, home food production reduces environmental footprint by lowering greenhouse gas emissions for food production and transportation. Relative to the prior work on reduction of food waste and sustainable community development that primarily rely on self-reported survey measures which have low predictive reliability, we use state of the art controlled experiment that implements actual sustainable food self-production facilities and measures real environmental, behavioral and attitudinal outcomes and therefore provides evidence-based policy recommendations.