Urbal is a multistep method that helps you better understand your sustainable food system innovation. With tools to map how food system innovations create changes and impacts over time, Urbal can help uncover key barriers and enablers of sustainability and provide important information for community members, practitioners, decision makers, and researchers working to make food systems better.

This guide explains how to use the Urbal process. It provides detailed information about how to elaborate activities linked to your food system innovation, how to map changes and impacts to food system sustainability, and how to identify the enablers and impediments to these changes and impacts.

Urbal also offers the possibility to benchmark, evaluate, and track the sustainability of food system innovations.

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Urbal objectives

Urbal is designed to support public and private practitioners – including innovators, policy-makers, community organizers, and funders – who want to advance and share their work to increase food system sustainability.

Urbal is a free, open access, adaptable, and easy to use tool to help guide planning and decision making for sustainable food system innovations.
Urbal helps you identify and map how an innovation creates changes and impacts in a food system.
Urbal helps you find the barriers and enablers to sustainability in a food system innovation.
Urbal highlights how innovations help transform sustainable food systems by being replicable, networked, amplified, supported, and/or disseminated at multiple scales.
Urbal enables the identification and selection of indicators to assess and monitor food system sustainability.

Through online, open access and customizable resources, Urbal enables :

Multi-stakeholder participation and co-learning,
A reflexive exercise to map pathways of change and impact,
An assessment of different dimensions of sustainability.

Urbal guide teasers

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Urbal stories

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Web/UX/UI Design by Pix and Love.

Funders,

Urbal has tools to help you:

Understand the changes and impacts connected to an innovation.
Better understand the challenges and enablers of an innovation.
Potentially track and evaluate the impact of funded innovations.
Assess the potential for longer term sustainability impacts of an innovation.

Researchers,

Urbal has tools to help you:

Conduct an overview of a food system innovation and better understand how it supports community empowerment and sustainability.
Bring together community knowledge holders to create an inclusive and reflective evaluation.
Identify innovation barriers and enablers.
Clearly communicate the value of your innovation to relevant audiences.
Develop indicators to track and evaluate your progress towards sustainability, if you choose.

Policy and decision makers,

Urbal has tools to help you:

Conduct structured overviews of food system innovations.
Understand, integrate, and promote food system innovations.
Gain the insights you need to strengthen sustainable food policies and overcome barriers to food system sustainability.
Develop and improve sustainable food system evaluations.
Use evidence from Urbal to develop more suitable policies and programmes.

Sustainable Food Systems actors,

Urbal has tools to help you:

Understand and guide your actions to meet sustainability objectives.
Collect the information you need to make better decisions.
Clearly communicate the value of your innovation to relevant audiences and attract more funding.
Network with your food region.
Develop indicators to track and evaluate your progress towards sustainability, if you choose.

Scale

The capacity of single initiatives to contribute to the transformation of sustainable food systems is weak if they are not likely to be replicated, imitated, networked, amplified, supported and disseminated at multiple scales (scaling capacity).

It is useful to consider different ways of scale for an innovation (Riddell and Moore, 2015):

“Scaling out” is impacting greater numbers. Strategies may include the replication or the spreading of projects and programs geographically and/or to greater numbers, or the dissemination of principles, knowledge, experiences, with the adaptation to new territorial contexts.
“Scaling up” is about impacting laws and policy (in legal terms, policy governance, commodity chain structuring, etc.),
“Scaling deep” is impacting cultural roots. That means spreading big cultural ideas and using stories to shift norms and beliefs, or investing in transformative learning and communities of practice.
“Scaling here” ?

Urbal can, through the participatory method and result sharing, accompany changes of scale by strengthening the capacity of practitioners to disseminate their innovations and contribute to the transition towards more sustainable food systems.

How? It helps stakeholders to reflect on the conditions, barriers and levers to spread their innovations to other scales.

Ressources

Video/pictures: scale picture (Source: Riddell and Moore, 2015, p.3) → visual
Shared experiences and feedbacks from other users: n/a
Urbal tools to help users : n/a
In-depth insights to download: So What 14.

Social innovation

According to Bouchard, Evers & Fraisse (2015), social innovation is an “intervention initiated by social actors to respond to an aspiration, meet a need, provide a solution or take advantage of an opportunity for cultural action in order to modify social relations, transform a framework of action or propose new orientations. From this point of view […] social innovation aims to modify the institutional frameworks that shape relationships in society”.

In URBAL, we consider social innovations when found the following characteristics:

They want change, responding to a social or societal need or seizing an opportunity for activating minor or major changes in society (Chiffoleau 2016).
They Are inclusive, seeking to benefit the whole society by the sharing of the value produced (economic, social, environmental,…)
They include collaborative or participatory activities.
- There is therefore an intentionality to change the situation in relation to the previous situation, to improve one or more aspects of the life of individuals.
- Social innovations are embedded in a value system, they are not intrinsically good and what is undesirable (problems) and desirable (solutions) can change over time.

Ressources

Video/pictures: rechercher l’interview de Veronica sur la définition d’innovation sociale (?) (Elodie ?)
Shared experiences and feedbacks from other users:
Urbal tools to help users :
In-depth insights to download: Master thesis Veronica : BONOMELLI V. Building a participative tool to map the impact pathway of urban driven innovations on food systems sustainability: how to consider specific features of social innovation? : Master thesis. Montpellier Supagro, 2018, 50p, So What 14.

Urbal participatory tools

Participatory engagement is at the heart of the Urbal methodology.

This approach relies on experts (not necessarily scientists but people with long experience and/or professional knowledge) and practitioners to be successful and provide useful insights. This means that all knowledge and experiences are equally valuable and valid.
A participatory process helps people to engage with others and reinforces stakeholders’ understandings and relationships.
A participatory process requires skills and tools supported by Urbal.

Ressources

Shared experiences and feedbacks from other users:

In-depth insights to download:

Master Thesis – participatory process and methodology

How to map change?

To enter the logic of the URBAL method at this point you can ask what has changed since the implementation of the innovative activity, namely the path of change that was triggered by the activity.
In order to answer this question, you use an Urbal’s representation of an impact pathway.
Impact pathway: a graphical chart that maps how an activity can generate short-term and medium-term changes to achieve long-term changes also called impacts.
Changes : transformations/consequences induced by an innovative activity
Impact: long-term changes linked to sustainability, caused by short and medium changes.

Ressources

Video/pictures: Pictures of the explanation of what an impact pathway is (see above) Ask Està to make it clean → Visual
Shared experiences and feedback from other users: example of an impact pathway completed by the participants (MIRI) – PDF files :
Urbal tools to help users : example of impact pathway map to be completed (Example of Milano Ristorazione → tool to ask Està to do in English . The columns include: innovative practice, activities, short-term changes, medium term and long term changes/impacts, sustainable dimension, factors (with drivers and barriers).
→ Miniature
In-depth insights to download:
Master Thesis – Impact pathway methodology literature review

What are sustainable food systems?

A sustainable food system “provides healthy food to meet current food needs while maintaining healthy ecosystems that can also provide food for generations to come, with minimal negative impact to the environment; encourages local production and distribution infrastructures; makes nutritious food available, accessible, and affordable to all; is humane and just, protecting farmers and other workers, consumers, and communities.”

(Story et al. 2009).
(Ref: Story M, Hamm MW, Wallinga D (2009) Food systems and public health: linkages to achieve healthier diets and healthier communities. J Hunger Environ Nutr 4:219–224).

There are many different opportunities to make the world we live in more sustainable through food systems. The key Urbal dimensions of sustainability are:

Health : food security (access, quality, regularity…), nutrition, well-being, physical activity…
Governance : transparency, power dynamics, people’s participation, accountability…
Environment : protection of biodiversity, renewable resources, energy efficiency, climate resilience…
Social-cultural : equity, community building, confidence in the system, positive expression of social and cultural identity and culture…
Economic : equity, resilience, fair work and remuneration, local economies…

Ressources

Video/pictures: diagram of the dimensions of sustainability à voir avec Està → visual
to research external brief explanatory pedagogical videos (Ophelie looks in the resources of the Unesco Chair and in the URBAL video) → visual
Shared experiences and feedbacks from other users: n/a
Urbal tools to help users : In-depth insights to download: IPES FOOD : FROM UNIFORMITY TO DIVERSITY – PDF file – A paradigm shift from industrial agriculture to diversifed agroecological systems