FUSILLI brings together 12 cities in a knowledge-sharing and learning community to jointly address the challenges of the food system transformation. The core ambition of these FUSILLI Living Labs is to develop an open innovation ecosystem with the objective to implement different innovative actions through all stages of the food chain, including production and processing, distribution and logistics, consumption, food loss and waste, as well as governance. As part of FUSILLI, the cities will be empowered to implement innovative and personalised policies and actions, placing citizens in the heart of the process
All FUSILLI cities have different starting points and thus different needs, which will help to cover a wide variety of European cases. Rome, for example, “has the same size as London, but only a third of its inhabitants. Like this, we have a lot of agriculture on the surroundings and, but now we need to bring this healthy food more into the metropolitan area of the city”, says Claudio Bordi from Risorse per Roma. In Tampere, Finland, “there are already a lot of sustainable food activities going on, like vertical or urban farming, but we want to expand those to create living labs in schools and pop-up restaurants on seasonal and climate food”, says Karoliina Tuukkanen from the City of Tampere. And in Differdange, Luxembourg, “there is a high dependency on food import, which has established itself as a problem during the COVID-19 pandemic and which will be tackled as part of the FUSILLI project”, according to Martin Kracheel from Ville de Differdange.
The 12 cities where the FUSILLI Living Labs will be developed are: