La Pepiniere: creating a communality dedicated to healthy, local, affordable, and sustainable food
Located in Aubervilliers in the outskirts of Paris, in an old warehouse beautifully refitted by its users, La Pepiniere is a self-managed and community-oriented hub dedicated to providing healthy, sustainable, affordable, and when possible local food. The premises host four local food networks linked with small food producers, a grocery, caterers, a restaurant, a café and two wood-burning bread and pizza ovens, one of which on wheels! And more projects to come as more people join.
Local
France
Aubervilliers
Mainly urban
It refers to a physical transformation of the built environment (hard investment)
No
No
Yes
2022-09-05
As a representative of an organisation
Name of the organisation(s): La Pepinière Type of organisation: Non-profit organisation First name of representative: Viviane Last name of representative: griveau genest Gender: Female Nationality: France Function: member organization Address (country of permanent residence for individuals or address of the organisation)<br/>Street and number: 62 bis rue du moutier Town: aubervilliers Postal code: 93300 Country: France Direct Tel:+33 6 41 96 26 45 E-mail:admin@lapepiniere-aubervilliers.fr
La Pepiniere is a place shared and managed in common by a group of locals of a city dealing with huge social issues : poverty, lack of shops offering healthy foods, lack of access to nature, gardens and green places to produce vegetables, lack of public services. The Pepiniere's aim was to build a communal, self-managed space following an empowerment logic, in order to provide all city residents with services oriented towards healthy, sustainable, affordable, and (when possible) local foods. The project currently brings together some 150 people, including families, around four local food networks working with small food producers, a particpative grocery, and 3 caterers, some of which are migrant women-led and founded start-ups. The premises also harbor a collective kitchen, whose target is to cook unsold vegetables from the local market and thus promote the circular economy, a participative café, a bread oven where people can bake their bread, pastries, and pizzas together. A special space is dedicated to children so that it can be an inclusive place for women and families. The project recently moved to larger premises, located in an old warehouse, and so now centers around the collective rehabilitation of the place, including interior design, architectural conception, and the general makeover of the premises to fit the organization's activities.
common place
sustainibility
local
food
inclusion
The key objectives of our project in terms of sustainability are to offer a place dedicated to a resilient vision of food. Sustainability was a major factor in the choice of the premises, its design, and the activities the project encompases.
On the first hand, the local chosen was an old wharehouse of the city's old industrial district in order to contribute actively to the transformation of urban neglected districts and to offer it a new identity and role in adequacy with the requirements of ecological transition.
Sustainability was also taken into account in the specific bioclimatic design of the premises, in which we built an open-roof patio with greenery to deal with the terrible heat island effect that keeps getting worse each year because Aubervilliers is a concrete city.
Lastly, the architectural design was planned collectively with volunteer architects in association with all the project members, so that the space's design would closely fit the needs of all its users. Five spaces were thus designed. 1. A space dedicated to children with toys. We paid close attention to safety regulations so that the children could play in perfect autonomy. 2. A communal kitchen that could be used both by caterers (since three are members of the project) and for upcycled cooking, a circular approach that collects and cooks unsold food from the local market. 3. A space to host a communal collaborative grocery giving access to organic foods at affordable prices. 4. A space for an associative café that offers a new place to meet and to organize cultural events (concerts...). 5. a place that could welcome small groups, and specifically become a collection point for local food networks that deliver weekly boxes of organic vegetables or fish.
There are three key objectives of our project in terms of aesthetics and quality of experience. The first purpose is to offer a large, lighty and comfortable space for meetings, vegetable baskets drop-off meetings, citizen nonprofit activities, concerts, and cultural events. The warehouse architecture is perfect because a sizeable number of persons can be welcomed without it feeling too crowded. Wood panels were used after isolating the walls to preserve a sense of lightness in the building. The second aim of the project was to be comfortable and welcoming to each and every kind of person. That's why a children's space was conceived in a tiny mezzanine with safety nets. Apart from the children place, the whole space is located on the same floor to preserve the site's accessibility for disabled people. A large space can be used to park bicycles (regular or cargo bikes) so that the street remains empty and doesn't suffer from La Pepiniere's activities. A glass partition was built in the space to separate the café, which can be a bit loud, from the collective kitchen, a place of work or more quiet or intimate meetings for some groups. Third, the interior design takes care to preserve a kind of "at-home feeling" with old, recycled or upcycled furniture, a bit wonky, a bit tinkered : each can feel that the place is made for them and welcomes everybody. To rent a space is also a conscious choice, as the previous space the organization had was lent by the city, but was then revoked. The project hopes that renting a space and rehabilitating it will offer more stability and adequacy to its activities than being dependant of public policy.
The key objectives of our project in terms of inclusion is triple: practical, inclusive, and political. Regarding the practical perspective, the aim of building this place is to offer a space that gathers services centered around food. The key point is so to supply affordable and competitive prices for healthy, organic, sustainable, and local food. We chose to organize all the activities by selfmanaged, volunteerled, and participative governance : the grocery, the food networks, the collective kitchen - everything is organized and run by the spaces users. Such an organization helps saving money by avoiding wages and so allows for lower prices than in ordinary organic supermarkets. Inclusion is also a target in itself for the project, as the project integrated very quickly several projects carried by migrant women, who founded a start-up of catering activities. They were so given the choice to join the project, or to use for free the kitchen during six months as an incubation test during the renovation of the space. At the end of the collective work on the building, a decision was made to go further in the collaboration : their catering activity became a member of the project and so participates towards the monthly rent of the space. The project also has a civic dimension. Indeed, the choice of participative governance was not only financial but also societal. The project wants to show that citizens and locals are major actors of the ecological, economic, and social transition and that they can help transform territorities and ways of life. So participative governance is a way to create an empowered community that works actively to transform its life conditions.
As the project is carried by and for citizens, all of whom benefit directly from the rehabilitation of the space. First, citizens who are involved in the creation of food networks benefit from the creation of a new, convenient and large space to organize their distributions of vegetables, citruses, fish, and dairy products. The fact that the place is selfdirected allows for flexible opening hours that fit the needs of the people involved. Secondly, citizens with nonprofit activities in the city get a free space to meet and to discuss their activities, with flexible opening hours. Creatives and artists get a space for concerts and the promotion of their activities. Migrants, people dealing with heavy social issues gained a space to test their professional projects - just like in an incubator (which they would never have had access to in the first place), but free. The project had a major impact on all these fronts : the circularity of the process helped to achieve the rehabilitation with only collective volunteer work, the diversity of economic activities hosted in the space helps to divide and pay the rent, and allowed the project to have one year of rent in advance. The types of involvement have proven to be fluid: people involved in one of the food networks have become volunteers for the café, or have revealed themselves as artists who use the space for their creations. So the creation of a common space that is at the core of the project, with a special focus on food, has helped to create a circular and virtuous ecosystem dedicated to a sustainable community strongly committed to the perspective of transition and resiliency.
The project was born of the will of inhabitants of Aubervilliers and made the choice of participative and self-directed organization in its design but has still always worked closely with public institutions. Investments for the rehabilition work were obtained through local public support, the city of Aubervilliers and surrounding cities, and the state (public policies for social issues and for dynamic territories). Moreover, some specific parts of the project, such as the bread oven, also were partially funded by the city. We've been working with social services to provide food aid to people in need. We've been working with social housing department of Aubervilliers to identify relevant places to organise activities. We've also been sollicited by the city to provide fooding during various cultural events. We organize workshop with pupils of the city which are co-designed with local teachers and education services.
The project was built associating several fields of knowledge but also citizens' experience and international inspirations in a cross-cutting approach. Several knowledge fields focused on urban issues largely contributed to the project - of course architecture for the rehabilitation part, but also urban planning, for the ideation part focused on the services that one would want to find today in an urban common space. More largely, emerging theories from diverse fields dealing with the ways to renew democracy nowadays were at the core of the project, specifically reflexions on the concept of commons in order to build a low-carbon and sustainable society. But experiences fed the project too, for example, practices of food networks and drop points: the encounter of all these trends helped create not only a space centered on healthy food but a place of citizen empowerment centered on local community resiliency. The idea of a large space, with a café, hosting cultural events was born from this mix of abstract approaches regarding local democracy and needs coming from experience. The process gave the project its singular identity between inclusion, intellectual commitment and practical approaches.
Around 150 families benefit from the activites of La Pépinière. They do not only benefit but are also involved in their organization which we believe has a positive impact on the feeling of belonging in a community and solidarity between it's members. We distribute food products of small, independant, socially and environmentally responsible producers, helping them make a living of it. We distributed food aid to dozens of families. Moreover, another association of caterers, Les Femmes Battantes, uses La Pépinière as their workplace, allowing them to achieve financial autonomy.
This project follows a strongly innovative, exclusively local and bottom-up approach to issues that mainstream politics and policy usually overlook by appraching them on a larger scale. Indeed, access to healthy food is mostly treated with top-down approaches driven from a national level. Moreover, the food question is mainly approached from a health point of view without addressing its social dimension, and specifically, the price of healthy food. The project's intuition is that food is a tool to build inclusion and a path to community empowerment. Therefore, the three starting points of the project were: the idea of doing things ourselves first ; a focus on the pleasure of food and community-building ; and the importance of affordability. The project works because people have a financial interest to access and use this space that hosts affordable food services, but also because people were pleased to spend time together. This process built a strong support among the city residents, whereas public policies usually neglect them or are of short duration: here, people feel involved in a common realization. Since the project moved to its new premises, the success of the rehabilitation aspect of the project shows that the project's previous activities succeeded in building durable engagement from the public and creating a community of volunteers. It goes to show the long-lasting support this perspective conveys.
The project methodology was based on the crossing of approaches, the horizontality between people, knowledge exchanges, and a transparent frame in governance. The transparent frame of governance is based on regular public meetings where everybody can participate. Some simple communcation tools are used, such as a collective mailing list and group text discussions to send widely and transparently all the informations necessary to participating in the life of the project. An accent was also put on horizontality so that everybody can find his or her place in the project : decisions are taken by vote in public. This approach does not preclude calling upon specific expertise, but it integrates in within collective decision-making. For example, the redesign of the warehouse required architectural skills: these were brought by volunteers experts but nevertheless, the design process was collective and took care to integrate the wishes of each person who wanted to participate. The rehabilitation part of the project also asked for technical skills, but horizontality was also present: every member could participate, whenever he or she has experience or not. This approach encourages skill-sharing and skill-building, so that the majority is gradually empowered to make better-informed decisions.
The project could easily inspire other initiatives since it is flexible and adaptable. Indeed, La Pepiniere is first and foremost an idea and a method that can easily be transposed. The method is threefold. First of all, a major aspect of La Pepinière is to group together key services, with a real sense of saving money - its practical aspects being a major source of public support. By this experience we have learned that people can strongly support the ecological transition if it is implemented while paying attention to their practical issues. Second, we also learned that practical efficiency is only one aspect: in order for people to really commit to the transition, it must be practical but also living, pleasant, and friendly. Lastly, the horizontal approach is key, as it is also a guarantee for people's support and for its perpetuation. This project is the illustration that the ecological transition could be easily realized if it becomes desirable for citizens. A common space to meet and have access to affordable is healthy food is one illustration. These three elements would be easy to replicate anywhere, provided the locals and their needs are associated at every step in order to ensure none of the elements are missed.
But the project also carries in itself the seed of its replication. Since it is a horizontal and self-managed project, people who have known and participated in La Pepiniere have all the organizational tools and the ideas and objectives they could need to promote the method in their workplace, to their families, or in their next community if they move out.
The Covid pandemic showed that access to food, let alone healthy, sustainable, and affordable, in urban areas is a major issue - especially for low-income families. Studies show also that the eating organic, unprocessed food with more vegetables and less fat, additives and preservatives is also an important health issue. There is clear data on the prevalence of food disease in populations dealing with social issues. Therefore, the creation of a unique place that gathers several actors and services dedicated to provide access to sustainable and healthy foods, in an underprivileged city, is a local solution that addresses local, regional, and even global challenges. Where large structures proved to be fragile when Covid paralyzed the usual logistics chains, small structures such as La Pépinière place kept going and fully demonstrated their resiliency during the pandemic, thanks to their agility and use of fewer intermediaries. Moreover, large structures met huge contamination issues, whereas small structures such as La Pépinière adapted their attendance rates in order to limit interpersonal contact. Beyond the pandemic, La Pépinière also wishes to become a friendly and horizontal space to share cultures and to discover other ways to eat without patronization or top-down policies, which are often rejected by the populations targeted. Lastly, a major question regarding the ecological transition is "how to make people change." La Pépinière is one way to create change within people, offering them what they are seeking, good and affordable food, and empowering them to take action in a pleasant setting that carries a strong, but soft message.
