Abstract Summary
The city of Almere increasingly steps to the plate to steer food policy towards more sustainable goals. One way they do this is through Almere Oosterwold, a green neighborhood where inhabitants must use 50% of their plot for urban agriculture. The municipality formulated an ambition that over time, 10% off all food consumed in Almere must be produced in Oosterwold. This begs the question, how can citizens evolve over time from producing the food to also distributing and selling the food to other citizens? In other words, how can prosumers become entrepreneurs? In this study, we engaged the citizens of Almere Oosterwold in an action research capacity to think about what future they can imagine for urban agriculture, and what actions they must take to make these futures into reality. We used techniques of futuring as a methodological platform by organizing online and offline futuring workshops with participants. We started with exploring images of the future, and following we backcasted those images to the present day. Our findings show that citizens have a plethora of ideas of how to produce (more) food, and how to make sure this food makes its way to Almere. However, there are several constraints, starting with actually producing enough surplus to sell, trade or give away, all the way to having enough volunteers and participants to make new initiatives (e.g. cooperations, knowledge networks) into a success. Furthermore, citizens don’t want more regulation but expect the government to facilitate new initiatives for entrepreneurship.
