Season’s Greetings from SHARECITY!

Published by SHARECITY on the 18th December 2018.

Another year at SHARECITY comes to a close!

Thank you for your continuous interest in our project. This year has been filled with many exciting events at SHARECITY! Throughout 2018, SHARECITY made its transition from the research and development of the SHARECITY100 database and the extensive in-depth ethnographies to the sustainability assessment of food sharing practises. We would hereby like to thank all of the SHARECITY team, previous and current members, for the hard work that has been put in to achieve the manifold outputs over the last months!

A very special congratulations to PI Anna who has on been awarded Researcher of the Year by the Irish Research Council two weeks ago! You can find out more about Anna’s work (including SHARECITY!) and the award in this video.

This year we had our first SHARECITY twitter #adventcalendar which included our #24tweetsofsharing. The starting point for this was to spark a reflection on the nature of sharing. In the beginning of this festive season we asked: What are holidays really about? How can we incorporate more sharing into our lives and celebrate sustainably? In the #24tweetsofsharing we included some tips on going zero waste on Christmas, eco-friendly gift wrapping and ways to celebrate without engaging in extensive shopping sprees.

We also did some soul searching why food sharing is important, ways to integrate more sharing into your life and diverted attention to inspiring new food sharing practises on the horizon. What’s more, we looked beyond the food sharing world and found projects which explore alternative future scenarios including Sharetown, the upright project and bemorewithless.

Also part of the advent calendar was to show how SHARECITY continues to investigate food sharing practises all over the world. We had a couple of inspiring new publications coming out this last few weeks:

• Marovelli, B. (2018) Cooking and Eating Together in London: Food Sharing Initiatives as Collective Spaces of Encounter, GeoForum
• Morrow, O. (2018) Sharing Food and Risk in Berlin’s Urban Food Commons, GeoForum
• Rut, M. and Davies, A. (2018) Transition without confrontation? Shared food growing niches and sustainable food transitions in Singapore, GeoForum
• Weymes, M. and Davies, A.R. (2018) [Re]Valuing Surplus: Transitions, technologies and tensions in redistributing prepared food in San Francisco, GeoForum

These four articles together with the Editorial will appear in the Special Issue by GeoForum “Davies, A.R. and Evans, D. (ed.) (2018) Urban Food Sharing: Geographies, practices and disruptions” which will be published soon!

What has become clear over the course of SHARECITY’s research in the first three years, is that the international food sharing landscape is shaped by the immense engagement of many diverse food sharing initiatives in cities around the globe. We would hereby like to praise the work of all of the initiatives in the SHARECITY 100 database and beyond, which materialize an alternative urban food system! Through their work “another world is not only possible, it is already happening” (Transformative cities, 2019). Especially at this time of the year, many of these initiatives play a big role in making the festive season a wonderful experience for everyone. Celebrate your successes and keep up the good work in 2019!

To give you a short outlook on 2019, SHARECITY will be launching the sustainability assessment tool in summer 2019. Also, we will have new team member joining us in January 2019 who will be leading the research on the governance of urban food sharing. Very exciting times ahead, so stay tuned! We will keep you updated on our progress and outputs throughout the next months! If you like to get in touch: twitter, facebook or write an e-mail to: sharecity@tcd.ie

Until then, we wish you all a wonderful festive season with lots of food-filled celebrations and a peaceful 2019!

Anna, Stephen and Vivien