Alternative food narratives. Activities towards more sustainable food production and consumption: Dodo’s urban farmers group in Helsinki

Abstract

This research-based thesis explores alternative narratives around food developed by grassroots social innovation initiatives in Helsinki. The study is an invitation to look deeper into how they are creating change, particularly how they are doing so through the production of a visual narrative to better understand how interactions amongst themselves and with their surroundings emerge and develop over time. The initiative studied here is one of those working with food issues, towards more sustainable food production and consumption.

As a basic biological need, many of the daily decisions that people take are related to food. However, being such constant, routine decisions, their social and environmental implications and consequences are often overlooked (for instance, CO₂ emissions caused by production and distribution). Therefore, from ‘the field’ (production) to ‘the table’ (consumption), citizens and institutions alike are working towards more sustainable behaviours; though some of these efforts coincide, reach and aims generally vary between the bottom-up and the top-down.

Grassroots social innovation initiatives propose alternative narratives to the ones developed by the mainstream. They contribute in a modest but tangible way to the modification of behaviours and beliefs on a local level, and help to redefine notions of wellbeing regarding desired quality of life or lifestyles. Some approaches, such as design for social innovation or design activism, enable designers to support and spread the innovative practices originated by citizens in order to disrupt the current status quo. The way citizens get together and why they do so has changed, creating new scenarios for the analysis of social action; as such, designers are exploring the role visualizations can play in disseminating and understanding the knowledge and changes the initiatives generate.

In looking at a case study from Helsinki - Dodo’s urban farmers group - this work utilizes visualizations and narrative to present the story of such an initiative, in order to understand their motives, the actors they engage and the activities they propose. The research shows that grassroots social innovation initiatives develop ‘alternative’ and multidimensional narratives, where time and context are fundamental to understanding how they interact with actors and space through the proposal of concrete activities.

My conclusions regard the importance that developing narrative-making as a practice could have for grassroots social innovations initiatives; something not only crucial for designers working with social innovation, but also for the initiatives to better understand themselves, helping to visualize what can be developed or reconfigured further. Including information about context contributes to comprehending the initiatives’ interactions with institutions, and clarifies the importance of timing for such collaborations. However, my main purpose within these pages remains the acknowledgment of the work that the initiative has been doing for several years, towards more sustainable food production and consumption in Helsinki.