Colloquium on Urban Food Sustainability and Food Resilience

The CO-SFSC project team held a Colloquium on Urban Food Sustainability and Resilience with Rebecka Milestad (FOI), Aylin Topal (METU) and Ashley Coby (SCORAI) on November 24th 2025.
Visitors were able to join in person at ITAS Karlsruhe or online. The colloquium was moderated by Dr. Ashley Colby of the Sustainable Consumption Research and Action Initiative (SCORAI) from Chicago.
The guests
Dr. Rebecka Milestadt from the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI), expert for Food Resilience
Rebecka Milestad is an agronomist and has a PhD in Rural Development Studies from the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Uppsala. Her current employment is with the Swedish Defence Research Agency (FOI) where she is involved in research on food preparedness. She does qualitative research on sustainable and resilient food systems with an inter-and transdisciplinary approach. In her presentation she took a point of departure in “food resilience” and covered a number of challenges that are tackled in some of her current projects, including the project coordinated by colleagues at ITAS: Co-creation of sustainable food supply chains.
Prof. Aylin Topal, Middle East Technical University: Potentials and Risks of Urban Community Gardens in Turkey
Aylin Topal is a professor at the Department of Political Science and Public Administration at Middle East Technical University. Her research focuses on the political economy of sustainable development.
Her presentation examined the potentials and risks of urban community gardens (UCGs) in Turkey through comparative case studies from Ankara, İzmir, and İstanbul. Grounded in the theoretical framework of commons and commoning, the study explores UCGs as dynamic spaces of collective resource management, social relations, and political contestation. While community gardens are often celebrated for fostering social inclusion, ecological sustainability, and food security, they also carry risks of reproducing exclusionary and neoliberal dynamics. The research employs qualitative methods, including semi-structured focus groups and participant observation, to analyze three distinct gardens with diverse governance structures and beneficiary profiles. Findings reveal the ambivalent nature of UCGs: some act as sites of alternative, emancipatory community building and food provisioning, while others reinforce existing inequalities and exclusion. The study emphasizes the importance of understanding gender, power relations, and local context in assessing the role of community gardens as urban commons, highlighting their potential both as arenas of resistance and reproduction of hegemonic urban policies in Turkey.
In case you missed the colloquium...