LOT is a digital platform that enables citizens to claim patches of unused land to start greening projects.
LOT works with land owners to list tiny or big land patches leading to co-management and use of green infrastructure at a hyperlocal level.
Local
Italy
We feel that the concept could be deployed by any local authority/ land owner that is interested in engaging directly with the citizenship and give up land to create community-led urban gardens.
Mainly urban
It refers to other types of transformations (soft investment)
LOT works as a middleman between landowners and local citizens by facilitating the assignment of unused/underutilised land to citizens willing to turn it into a community asset for people, that sequesters carbon and produces edible food. The main public-facing touchpoint is a digital platform that displays on map the location of available patches so that citizens can claim them as ‘stewards’ upon the presentation of a project proposition. Moreover, LOT brings awareness to an available patch of land by putting physical signages that include a QR code linked to the website.
Community cohesion
Urban agriculture
Urban resilience
Nature based solutions
Citizen engagement
LOT fosters urban greening and urban food production by turning disused local land into a positive asset from a sustainability perspective. Through helping locals access land near them, LOT contributes to urban greening, maintenance of biodiversity and tree planting : this sequesters carbon, reduces the effect of heatwaves at a hyperlocal level, favours the presence of insects and wildlife, in very specific contexts could be used for flood prevention.
With respect to food production, food miles are reduced by turning a patch of urban land into an asset that contributes positively to the local food environment, specifically in food insecure areas of the city.
The main objective for LOT is facilitating the assignment of local land to citizens in a legal way. We enable a bottom-up green space management that can be quickly achieved at scale and brings social and environmental and mental benefits.
Very often citizens like to work on land in their local area. However through our research with local communities, we identified that establishing ownership of the land and getting access to it in a rightful manner is often a big hindrance. Sometimes people start growing a garden in a public space but they are considered squatters and their gardens are forced to stop. Even when a community manages to get permissions to use a patch, it's always a laborious and one-off process and there is the need to start again from scratch for new projects. LOT aims to solve these problems by acting as a professional entity that proactively negotiates a standard for meanwhile lease with the landowner in a way that simplifies the processes to deal with community requests. A framework of standards for temporary land leasing are used to create customisable leasing contracts, making sure they reflect different land categories in the portfolio of each landowner to define what can be grown in every category. The presence of a standard of land lease builds trust and speeds up the assignment process and also enables monitoring of the land.
With both physical and digital touch-points, LOT raises awareness of the service among the public very promptly. United with a digital UX that aims at creating a smooth assignment process from both a front-end and back-end perspective, it fosters the possibility for the initiative to scale up quickly and meet the objectives as soon as possible.
Under-utilised land is embellished and citizens' interaction with green spaces is strengthened supporting psychological wellbeing as per the "nature based solutions theory". Community cohesion is fostered by prioritising projects that work in favour of the community.
Through our work with several council estates in London, LOT has evidenced that community gardens, if run with transparency, brings ethnically diverse communities closer. Little decisions like growing a diverse variety of vegetables helps make the gardens more inclusive. Moreover, improving the accessibility of a common space for residents improves community engagement and reduces unwanted disputes. LOT helps communities not only acquire land but also provides them with guidance on setting it up, establishing decision making processes and best practices for inviting community and running it in a sustainable manner. It also provides them a platform to share their story with other gardens in their vicinity and interact with other communities.
As the number of allotments available for citizens decline and with waitlists for up to 10 years, LOT provides a new and accessible allotment model that is relevant to this day and age. With demand for green spaces increasing, LOT provides all age groups a more technologically equipped way of getting access to green spaces.
Since its conception, LOT worked with local citizens through grassroot organisations to understand and address their hindrances in accessing land and in getting started without having to wait for several years for an allotment. LOT has simplified the process of accessing land in the rightful manner through clearly displaying the available LOT and safeguarded the community or individual’s interest by establishing standards of meanwhile leases.
Moreover, LOT helps community leaders or ‘stewards’ of land to onboard new members in the right way that improves the collaboration and engagement between the members. At the same time, the landowners (mostly local authorities and public entities) spend less on land maintenance as the citizens take to it.
LOT works with food insecure communities and helps them to grow their own food to some extent. Ultimately LOT provides the citizens with easy and quick access to green space in their local area and gives them a reason to engage with their community such that it massively helps reduce loneliness, isolation and improves the physical and mental wellbeing of the community members.
LOT also reduces the food disconnection in the younger generation by giving them space locally to understand all about food systems and biodiversity.
The team involved local stakeholders from the scratch. We did a lot of field research visiting multiple community gardens and greening charities all over London: we saw the spaces, spoke separately with their managers and volunteered with them. This research methodology helped us to understand really well who was already interested in gardening and what their experience was. Similarly, we interviewed officers working at local authorities of Camden, Lambeth, Newham to verify their point of view, priorities and problems. We invited some of the stakeholders we interacted with in a workshop that helped us to shape an approach to resolve the problems we’ve found. Once the proposition was developed we tested it with international experts from various fields: this helped the team to refine the proposition and understand the missing points to be addressed. We got appreciation from multiple councils we interviewed, by the West of England Combined Authority, by the international engineering firm Arup , by Davide Zarri (Food Trails officer in Bergamo) and by researchers from the Eu funded project EFUA that uploaded our project on their website. To us, this proves the value of the idea across borders
LOT is currently collaborating with Arup and Incredible Edible London and for the past 2 years has been working with local communities to develop a scalable model/framework of community food growing which we are soon to test in other European countries.
Service design is the methodology that was used to develop LOT's proposition. We had a large research phase in which we used ethnographic methods such as field visits (at existing community gardens), role playing and interviews (both user and expert). We also worked closely with officers at Local Councils in London and organised a multistakeholder workshop where we gathered qualitative data and ideated with public officers and members of charities. We tested the platform by running prototyping sessions of the User Interface (UI) and User Experience (UX), with good results.
This process helped us to understand the local context deeply and discover needs and pain-points that actors in this context were experiencing at the time.
Once we defined the proposition, the idea was tested with representatives of local charities, GIS experts, public officers, urbanists, architects and law experts. This process made clear the need to work with law experts and biologists in order to establish standards for meanwhile leases to protect the interests of both communities and landowners, and identify land categories that can be adapted to the needs of a specific landowner.
Moreover, since the past 2 years, we have been working with local communities to test the signage and understand how communities can best organise themselves.
Benefiting from our collaboration with Arup and incredible edible, the team is in the process of creating land categories and preparing guidelines for communities to establish, organise and run a community garden successfully. LOT has been testing aspects of digital community interactions through this research.
Usually, big patches of public land are divided and assigned to interested families so they can grow their own food. This model started early in the XX century and is still managed with paper modules and people get their allotments without time limits. This creates incredibly long waiting lists (Lewisham Council website reports 3700 people waiting for their patch). LOT aims to break this outdated way of working by improving access to land for community projects (allotments don’t have a specific community vocation) , especially access to smaller patches that otherwise are ignored or unused and cannot be divided in smaller units.
Lately we saw a competitor coming about: AllotMe is an English website and service that involves rental of private land in order to grow food. AllotMe focuses on small private gardens so it’s mostly a person renting their back garden to another person so that they can grow their own vegetables.
LOT instead proactively approaches big landowners that could provide big patches so that community projects (and not private ones) could start. LOT’s partners are mainly public authorities or companies that provide public services (railways companies for example). We believe that by operating in this way we can create better outcomes in terms of community cohesion and public space enhancement.
We noted that these types of stakeholders sometimes lease their spaces to the local communities but have long and laborious processing times. More importantly, they are one of a kind. LOT provides a shortlist of patches that can be claimed and a standard for meanwhile lease of green spaces which facilitates and speeds up the assignment to the public.
The concept was developed based on research performed in the UK but we have similar patterns in the market in the whole Western world and beyond.
We expect the concept to be transferable to other geographies in its entirety. The first round of research has been done in London but the team is now collaborating with a global team at Arup to investigate user needs and pain points in 7 other countries. The preliminary results shared by the Arup team showed us that the problems are similar which is encouraging when thinking of sharing LOT's model and approach. This is particularly true for Europe and those places with a strong presence of the state: at Terra Madre, Slow Food's yearly conference, LOT's team was invited to present where we met representatives from Italy, Warsaw (Poland) and Caxais (Portugal) who appreciated the idea.
On the other hand, we cannot blindly deploy LOT without performing research and have an adaptation plan for each country we'll deploy LOT in: Bandung (city in Indonesia, member of the MUFPP) is a city highly interested in community gardening but the bottom-up approach that LOT has may not work well in that specific context ( Indonesia is not a priority country for LOT). Or for example, if we consider the vibrant landscape of community gardens in Rome (whose relationship with the municipality have waves of ups and downs, we would have to carefully assess a strategy to introduce LOT in order to avoid backlashes.
Lastly, legislative aspects may differ from country to country even within Europe which calls for careful assessment as per the meanwhile lease standardisation.
Considering the SDGs, LOT is directly and particularly related to n11 “Sustainable Cities and Communities”. By co-managing land with the public, public authorities and big landowners can indirectly enhance the living space within cities and foster community cohesion.
Furthermore, LOT addresses multiple categories proposed in the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact, the worldwide and leading protocol aimed at tackling food-related issues at the urban level. LOT particularly contributes to is the Food production one: LOT proposition would suit really well for Action 20 Promote and Strengthen Urban and PeriUrban agriculture and particularly Indicator 25 and 26 (“Number of city residents within the municipal boundary with access to an urban agriculture garden” and “Presence of municipal policies and regulations that allow and promote agriculture production and processing in the municipal area”). Action 22 “Apply an ecosystem approach to guide holistic and integrated land use planning and management” and Action 23 “Protect and enable secure access and tenure to land for sustainable food production in urban and peri-urban areas, including land for community gardeners” with the indicators 27 and 28 (“Surface area of potential agricultural spaces within the municipal boundary” and Proportion of total agricultural population -within the municipal boundaries- with ownership or secure rights over agricultural land for food production by gender). From a Governance perspective, LOT directly supports Action 2 “Enhance stakeholder participation”, whilst LOT indirectly supports most of the actions within “Sustainable diets and nutritions” because it enables the creation of community-led and positive food environments that can be stage for food education activities. In the same way, LOT could support the Social and Economic Equity cluster because it’s a common practice that food from community gardens is donated to food banks or produced for self-consumption reducing food insecurity.
