From basement to kitchen – a proud identity

Nina Vogel

Researcher Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, SLU

Lena Friblick

Founder and operations manager of Xenofilia and Stiftelsen Botildenborg

“I have to get going… it’s almost 5 p.m. I need to get some herbs from the yard farm and swing by basement 49 to pick up some ruccola salad before we go to our neighbours Ingrid and Ahmed’s to make dinner! I really look forward to these evenings, they are wonderful, relaxing and interesting, you always learn something about different food cultures, your neighbours and you don’t actually have to spend as much money as if you would be eating alone. It is certainly an improvement in the quality of life since the initiative From basement to kitchen in our community. My kids love it too.

They say that the yard, the spaces between the buildings, and our home are more alive and the whole atmosphere has changed. People are more curious and engaged. There is a proud identity in our area – here we have created our own local food products and new marketing sites are emerging. Rosengård Salad is now sold throughout Malmö!”
(Olga, 42, Living in Rosengård, Malmö)

Back to 2024 

Nearly every city and community has a high-rise housing area (Miljonprogramområde) that is in great need of social, ecological and economic solutions to create attractive living environments. In order to transform and renew the existing residential areas, novel community planning is needed that works across sectors and integrates people through inclusive and innovative perspectives.

In the project ‘From basement to kitchen – growing future visions for the million-housing program’, we take a close look at the local visions of the future for these housing areas. We anchor this work in the contemporary commitment and interest in urban farming, self-sufficiency and sustainable food, which has grown from a narrow movement to spread to more and more target groups, though is not fully established as an approach in urban planning.

Urban farming is used as a method to engage people in shaping their living environments and to create encounters for dialogue and learning. We start from three different areas in the million program areas: basements, spaces between buildings, and homes. Through speculative design with focus groups of residents, we aim at creating bold visions of the future where we develop the million program areas into flamboyant meeting places with e.g. self-sufficiency, sustainable energy systems and circular business models.

The project will generate several ideas and visions that will be exhibited at the Form/Design Center in Malmö. With the exhibition, we invite relevant stakeholders for a dialogue on exploring and understanding the impact of alternative futures to shape decisions in the here and now. As a prototype, we will start from an existing basement of the project partner MKB in Rosengård, where we can test indoor farming, social interactions and new business models during the project period in a co-creative process, and transform unsafe basements into social meeting places!

This project origin from SOIL – Social Innovation Living Lab – which is a collaboration of Botildenborg, a social farm and meeting place in Malmö, together with Malmö University, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, LUCSUS at Lund University, Region Skåne, the City of Malmö and the Form & Design Center at Malmö. SOIL uses food and farming as means towards a sustainable city, combining interest in social and ecological resilience, and realizing opportunities for a variety of new transdisciplinary research efforts. Research can concern the labour market, health, social integration, food production, sustainable urban development and entrepreneurship.

Living Laboratories offer a welcome approach for change management and knowledge co-creation to influence sustainable futures. While living labs take many forms and are defined in different ways, they always reflect an interest in open research environments that explore society-science interfaces in real time and represent arenas for learning. A critical living lab approach mobilizes these science-society collaborations as a means to experiment with novel processes, actor constellations and practices otherwise often difficult to set up in typical urban settings. The value of a critical living lab approach lies in the opportunities it creates for real change, by revealing (and critiquing) underlying operational mechanisms, that can be transferred into another context and can challenge the status quo.

As such, living laboratories are a key mechanism through which universities can contribute to a wider societal transition to sustainability.

Back to URBAN LIVING LAB theme page.