Ongoing projects

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Urban Agriculture Innovation Area - New Garden City Öjendorf

Hamburg's agriculture is an example of local sustainability challenges in the food system: Despite urban utopias, technological visions, civil society initiatives and demands for regional, environmentally friendly, sustainable production and marketing in the agricultural sector, the potential of urban agriculture has not yet been used as a momentum for innovative business concepts, sustainable lifestyles, contributions to climate and environmental goals and regional economic dynamics of a sustainable agriculture and food industry in the city-regional area (Feldmann et. al. 2023). The surrounding farms have been supplying the growing metropolis with agricultural products for centuries, in particular vegetables, ornamental plants and cut flowers from the Vier- und Marschlanden and fruit from the Altes Land. Despite this tradition on the one hand and many visions and experiments in the field of urban gardening on the other, local agriculture in Hamburg is coming under increasing pressure: population growth requires more housing to be built, sometimes on land previously used for agriculture, such as in Oberbillwerder or the new garden city of Öjendorf. Experts agree that the connections between city dwellers interested in gardening and commercial horticulture must be established and strengthened in order to shape the field of tension between urbanization, regionality and relocalization, health awareness, urban gardening and digitalization with innovative, integrative and sustainable concepts of urban agriculture.

The project aims to establish an innovation area for urban agriculture as part of the urban development of the Neue Gartenstadt Öjendorf on land previously used for agriculture in Hamburg. Together with our cooperation partners HafenCity University Hamburg and the Julius Kühn Institute, our department is developing a conceptual framework for the participatory development and testing of plausible business scenarios for various innovation models for horticultural production, value creation and marketing. The aim is to help integrate the wide variety of forms of urban agriculture in a context-specific manner into a viable, transferable demonstration model and development process for urban agriculture.

Image: Lubos Houska on Pixaby

Organic climate vegetables

In cooperation with the Department of Agricultural and Food Marketing, the junior research group is investigating the obstacles and potentials of a climate-adapted, regional value network for organic vegetables.

How can the contribution of regionally and organically produced vegetables to a sustainable diet be increased and the value creation network be adapted to the effects of climate change in northern Hesse at the same time? For the simultaneous expansion and adaptation of production, economic, strategic and organizational questions regarding the characteristics of the value chains and consumer behaviour must be taken into account. The project therefore addresses not only the fresh produce sector, but also the creation of regional processing structures. To ensure that regional value creation networks can be developed successfully, the seasonal limitations of the regional supply and the consumption habits of consumers are examined. Interviews, workshops, network analyses and consumer surveys are carried out in close cooperation with practitioners in order to create system, target and action knowledge for sufficient regional production, processing and sales structures.

To the project website and the other cooperation partners

Image: Aaron Burden on unsplash

Logbook of changes

The 'Logbook of Changes' is a citizen science qualitative long-term diary study. Since March 2020, citizens have been documenting observations in their everyday routines that have been changed by the coronavirus pandemic and other crises.
The project is being carried out in cooperation with the [Sustainability-Transformation-Transfer] research center at Eberswalde University for Sustainable Development.
The Hans Sauer Foundation is currently funding a project module for the co-interpretation and communication of the results.
A public discussion event took place on May 5 at the Humboldt Labor in Berlin.

To the event

Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership

The Postdoc Academy for Transformational Leadership is an international cooperative continuing education project network aimed at interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary research postdocs at European research institutions.