Author Archives: Saskia Bakelaar

EU Cultivate – Replication study Freiburg – Zusammen Leben x WUR x Cascoland

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Plan

During the replication phase of the EU Cultivate project, WUR will travel with the Library of Citizen engagement to the Food Sharing initiatives in each of the six spoke locations.

Our first stop ? Freiburg im Breisgau – where WUR & CASCOLAND visited CULTIVATE partner Zusammen Leben.  

Zusammen Leben – (German for Living together) have been managing a 3500 square meter community garden – as an intercultural meeting space since 2016. And as part of the ten year anniversary of this intercultural civic space, Zusammen Leben hosted a Lab &Kitchen at the garden. As explained in our library, Lab & kitchen is a creative methodology that fosters collaboration, bridges knowledge systems and engages communities through participatory cooking and good sharing activities. Importantly, Lab&Kitchen evolves with each iteration, responding to specific community needs. In designing this Lab&Kitchen, Zusammen Leben and CASCOLAND agreed that engaging people with a migration background should take priority.

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Food Commons – Summer School 2025

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This June, the Rural Sociology Group (RSO) hosted its first ever Food Commons Summer School. In a new blog, Rohit Dash shares his experiences and insights from the event.

What if food could be shared like stories. What if, we could build the truly proverbial village in our communities to raise a farm of delicious, cared for and nutritious food. Imagine a world, where food systems were entirely “Commoned” stripped from the materialist notions of private ownership, instead nurtured by care and collective stewardship. How do we get to this utopia? Was there ever a precedent to such an utopia? or are there examples of islands of utopia that remain hidden in plain sight?

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Immersing in Kisumu’s urban food markets

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This blog post by Marit Meijer shares her experiences during the second fieldwork period of the project “Learning from Food Provisioning Networks in City Regions of Kenya”.

From May 26th to August 12th, 2025 I spend 2,5 months in Kenya for the second fieldwork period of the project “Learning from Food Provisioning Networks in City Regions of Kenya”. The focus of the fieldwork was to immerse (for 2 months) in two urban food markets in Kisumu, namely Kondele Market and Kibuye Market. People who have congregated in these market places for the last 10 years shared with us the history of their careers and their perspectives on present and future developments of the food markets. We want to extend our deepest gratitude to everyone willing to share with us their time, effort and personal stories so generously. And to those who introduced us to them. A special thanks goes out to Damarice Auma Akwanya, Moline A’chieng and Isiah Okoth.

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New Publication | On Babushkas and Postcapitalism: Theorising Diverse Economies from the Global East

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Sovová, L., Cima, O., Jehlička, P., Pungas, L., Sattler, M., Smith, T.S.J., Decker, A., Johanisova, N., Kovanen, S., and North, P., writing as Polička Collective (2025), On Babushkas and Postcapitalism: Theorising Diverse Economies from the Global East. Antipode. https://doi.org/10.1111/anti.70034

As transformative visions for more just and sustainable societies multiply around the globe, the Diverse and Community Economies approach presents one of the most influential strategies to advance postcapitalist visions. In this paper, we contribute to this project based on our research and activism in the Global East, intended here as Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. We argue that engaging with the Global East is not only a matter of epistemic inclusivity but also a (too-often-neglected) opportunity to learn from a region with a history of dramatic economic transformation and diversity. We highlight examples of community economies already contributing to more-than-human wellbeing, and we present emerging theoretical insights concerning temporality, the multi-sitedness of the enterprise, and diverse economic subjectivities. With that, we articulate our ongoing research agenda and advance conversations with postcapitalist scholarship and politics.

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Publication | Garden time and market time: Finding seasonality in diverse food economies

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by Lucie Sovová and Petr Jehlička, available open access at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2025.104322

This paper combines two fast-developing perspectives on food provision: diverse economies and temporality. Building on an in-depth study of urban gardening in Czechia, we show that non-market economies play a central role in household food practices and that their specific temporality shapes how other parts of a household’s diverse food economy are mobilised at certain times and for certain purposes. Following the diverse economies approach of reading for difference and not dominance, this paper investigates the interrelations and hierarchies among market, alternative market, and non-market food economies on the household level. We decentre the presumed dominance of market-based provisioning by showing that gardeners’ food behaviours are crucially shaped by their engagement with food self-provisioning (FSP), which creates particular understandings of food quality. What is more, the cyclical, natural time of gardening seasons determines the social rhythm of food provisioning in a contemporary urban context. This provides a counter-narrative to the dominant account about the dislodging of cyclical time embedded in natural processes by modern, accelerated time, with the former carrying a lower value than the latter. Finally, we engage with temporality on a discursive level as we counterpose our case of traditional FSP against the fascination with novelty permeating much of the search for alternative foodways. With this, we contribute to the debate on the temporality underpinning the ideas of capitalist modernity as well as post-capitalist prefiguration.

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