Farmers’ markets and services co-design to foster multifunctional and collaborative food networks

In recent years interest has been growing around food production and consumption due to both the economic difficulties farmers have to deal with and the frequent scandals in food systems that bring about health risks for consumers. In this perspective local production, especially from the productive countryside surrounding the big metropolitan areas, becomes crucial in offering new solutions to shorten the food chain and sustain local communities, keeping a system able to offer quality food at the right price. On closer observation it is possible to recognize positive signals: groups of people linking up with small family-run farms to meet their needs while supporting farming. These creative communities offer a foresight of a possible future in their new collaborative ways of organization that can be seen as real user-created services. In this framework we can foresee a new kind of territory consisting of new collaborative networks of producers and consumers able to involve a growing number of people and to create a diffuse and efficient system of services. Such a periurban area could feed the city while offering tourism opportunities to the city dwellers. Starting from these premises the paper analyses a set of case studies of direct selling solutions with a specific focus on farmers’ markets, targeting the typologies of services provided and the innovative solutions adopted. Gaining insight from these examples it then develops by describing the approaches applied by service design to the pilot project called Earth Market in the city of Milan, which is part of an ongoing research project for regional development in the Milanese area, and to the Union Square Greenmarket in New York. These interventions use service prototyping techniques and co-design to start a community centered design process in order to define new services for local needs. The project looks at farmers’ markets as suitable places for participatory action research and involves the local communities both in the definition of new services and in the implementation of the markets themselves. Finally the paper discusses the results obtained so far and proposes future steps.