Urban-Food Ecology
A systems understanding
Exploration
I deep-dived into the topics that were most relevant to the current food system and tried to get an overall understanding of the problems.
During this phase I did a PDC (Permaculture Design Course) and volunteered at a farm. I also carried out other primary and secondary research activities.
PDC and Volunteering at a Farm
Seed saving and Harvesting fresh food
Growing my own urban farm
Mapping out
This is an important stage in any systems design project. In this stage you map out all the research for visualizing the data.
This step makes it easier to comprehend the problems in the system and help us find solutions.
This chart visualizes the involvement of humans in their current food system.
The stakeholders are placed in rings around the human in the centre to represent immediate physical or mental proximity.
It helps us realize that even though our food comes from nature, we hardly ever trace it back to it in our day to day lives.
This chart is a quick representation of the interrelationships of the domains of human, food and nature.
The ideal scenario for the three domains is to live in harmony, however, our current lifestyles are causing humans to get disconnected, the food system to get degraded and nature to get destroyed.
Systemic Solutions
This step helped me reach solutions to the current urban-food problems. Looking at existing systems holistically and understanding the possibilities of change lead us to apt solutions in this stage.
System of Permaculture
This is an understanding of how the system of permaculture involves individuals and leads them to acting together as a community to solve their problems.
It also demonstrates the way other design solutions like future thinking and speculative design could be applied to permaculture.
Food-Futures Business model
A business model to tackle the food problems and to get urban dwellers more involved into their food systems by means of permaculture was developed.
This business model was further worked upon and can be looked at here.