The Thriving Foodscape Approach

Individual Choices

Healthy cities begin with healthy neighbourhoods

Health research and initiatives often focus on promoting desired individual behaviours like eating plenty of fruits and vegetables or exercising frequently. This puts excessive pressure on individuals - who often face external barriers to making these healthy choices.

On the other end of the spectrum, food systems at city, regional, national, and even global scales impact what kinds of food get produced, marketed, and are available to people to buy. While improving these systems will be critical in the effort to promote health equity, doing so is deeply complex, requiring involvement of many stakeholders and complicated decision-making to create large-scale change.

The Neighbourhood
Where individuals directly engange with larger systems

The Thriving Foodscapes Approach works in the space between individual behaviours and regional systems, focusing on the neighbourhood scale where people access and consume food as a part of their everyday lives. The approach recognizes that every community's collective experience and routines are influenced by their surrounding food offerings and the quality of the streets and public spaces they interact with when making food choices. By focusing on how urban design and programming can improve healthy food access and behaviours, this approach provides agency to local communities while still operating at a scale that can influence the environmental, economic, and health outcomes of a city.

Food Systems

Listening to people

Guidance on who to talk to and how to conduct interviews, including sample questions that lead to insightful answers.

  • Often those most impacted by food insecurity are also the most overlooked in engagement processes. The Thriving Foodscape Approach centres people's experiences by listening and asking questions about what they are experts in: their daily routines and what matters most to them when making choices related to buying and consuming food.

Elements of the Thriving Foodscape Approach

The Thriving Foodscape Approach evaluates the intersection of food, people, and the urban environment using a blend of quantitative, qualitative, and observational research methods. By leveraging different types of data, the methodology makes connections between people’s everyday food experiences, social interactions in public space, and neighbourhood design, creating a more complete picture of how urban planning and design can better support healthy food behaviours in a particular place.

Understanding the context

Methods for mapping foodscape actors and food places, as well as exercises to help define key study questions.

  • The Thriving Foodscape Approach depends on a deep understanding of local communities, including discovering what health issues are important locally. This includes researching the demographics of people living there, mapping food offerings and public realm conditions, and identifying the key stakeholders that shape everyday life in the community.

Turning data and observations into actionable solutions

Insights generated through a Thriving Foodscapes Assessment serve as a powerful foundation for imagining paths towards lasting change in a foodscape. A principal goal is to create actionable solutions that respond to a community's unique challenges and needs.

Central to this approach is continuing to learn, refine our understanding of the challenges, and build coalitions between different actors to move towards long-term impact.

To do this, insights can be used to co-create a Healthy Neighbourhood Strategy together with community members and stakeholders. This roadmap for lasting change can include multiple actions, ranging from high-level policy change to low-cost, temporary pilot interventions to test ideas and catalyse longer-term action.

To understand more how this can be done, check out our case studies and reports from past work.

Observing foodscapes

Digital methods to observe public space, public life, and food places, as well as an audio guide for evaluating place quality.

  • At the core of the Thriving Foodscape Approach is understanding people’s lived experiences in a neighbourhood through observation. By observing human behaviour – how people move around and spend time in the public realm and food places – and then assessing the quality and accessibility of the public realm, this method gives a more nuanced understanding of how the built environment influences people's everyday food habits for better or for worse.

Why work with Foodscapes?

Many steps along the food system, including production, processing, and distribution, are key contributors to greenhouse gas emissions.

According to FAO, a quarter of greenhouse emissions are caused by food production.

Food & economic development

Food & equity

Local food systems play a critical role in building community wealth by creating and sustaining community-based jobs. Yet, so much of our food is produced in large-scale industrial agriculture systems.

According to the American Independent Business Alliance, the multiplier effect of a locally owned business is 3x higher than that of a non-local business.

Food & climate

Structural inequities have led to the creation of low-income, marginalised neighbourhoods that have less access to healthy food and experience greater food insecurity and food-related illnesses.

According to USDA, 40% of food deserts in the US exist in neighbourhoods where income is at, or below, the poverty line.

Food & health

Today, approximately 537 million adults in the world are living with diabetes – a figure that is projected to rise to 783 million by 2045 if no action is taken. In 2021, diabetes was responsible for 6.7 million deaths and caused at least 966 billion USD in health expenditures.

According to the International Diabetes Association, 3 out of 4 people living with diabetes live in cities.


Increased Access and Awareness

Connect underserved communities to healthy food offerings and education.

What does success look like?

While every context, community, and application is different, the overarching aim of every Foodscape Assessment is to promote the following:


Reciprocity Between Organic & Human Systems

Reconnect people to the co-evolutionary cycle of nature through increased food literacy and food environments as social connectors.


Engaged Foodscape Actors and Empowered Community Leaders

Help break down silos by providing people with participatory tools to engage in a collaborative decision making process.


More Dignified Public Realm

Use foodscape-led public realm improvements to address poor health environments.


Healthier Communities

Leverage urban design and behaviour change to ensure the healthy choice is the easiest choice for individuals and communities.