Planning for change: Transformation labs for an alternative food system in Cape Town, South Africa
- PDF / 1,422,299 Bytes
- 26 Pages / 595.276 x 793.701 pts Page_size
- 72 Downloads / 204 Views
Urban Transformations
RESEARCH
Open Access
Planning for change: Transformation labs for an alternative food system in Cape Town, South Africa Laura Pereira1,2,3* , Scott Drimie1,4, Olive Zgambo1 and Reinette Biggs1,3 * Correspondence: pereira.laura18@ gmail.com 1 Centre for Complex Systems in Transition, Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, South Africa 2 Centre for Food Policy, City University of London, London, UK Full list of author information is available at the end of the article
Abstract There has been a call for more participatory processes to feed into urban planning for more resilient food systems. This paper describes a process of knowledge co-production for transforming towards an alternative food system in Cape Town, South Africa. A ‘transformative space’ was created though a T-Lab process involving change-agents advocating for an alternative food system, and was designed to discuss challenges in the local food system from a range of perspectives, in order to co-develop potentially transformative innovations that could feed into government planning. In this paper, we describe and reflect on the T-lab in order to consider whether its design was able to meet its objective: to initiate an experimental phase of coalition-building by diverse actors that could feed into the provincial government’s strategic focus on food and nutrition security. Our findings indicate that T-labs have the potential to be important mechanisms for initiating and sustaining transformative change. They can be complementary to urban planning processes seeking to transform complex social-ecological systems onto more sustainable development pathways. However, as with all experimental co-production processes, there is significant learning and refinement that is necessary to ensure the process can reach its full potential. A key challenge we encountered was how to foster diversity and difference in opinions in the context of significant historical legacies of inequality, whilst simultaneously acting for ‘the common good’ and seeking ways to scale impact across different contexts. The paper concludes with deliberations on the nature of planning and navigating towards systemic transformative change. Keywords: Co-production, Food systems, Governance, Participatory approaches, South Africa, Sustainability, Sustainability transformations, T-labs, Transformative space
Science Highlights T-Labs are specifically designed to guide transformations in social-ecological systems towards sustainability. T-labs are messy, emergent processes and to be most effective they should be informed by the needs of the participants. As transformative spaces, T-labs are ongoing processes of engagement with changemakers, not single events. © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the C
Data Loading...
