Civic food
37 places in the atlas
Food, gardens, agriculture and markets as an infrastructure of encounter and care: community canteens, shared gardens, agri-food networks.
Japan6
First Makishi Public Market第一牧志公設市場
Naha, Okinawa · Okinawa
"Okinawa's kitchen": a municipal market of over 70 stalls with the mochiage system (buy the produce and have it cooked upstairs), reopened in 2023 as…
Furano Marcheフラノマルシェ
Furano, Hokkaido · Hokkaido
A food and retail complex on the site of a relocated hospital, a national symbol of citizen-led town centre revitalisation, combining local produce,…
Ibasho House居場所ハウス
Ofunato, Iwate · Tohoku
A donated farmhouse dismantled and rebuilt by local artisans after the 2011 tsunami.
Kodomo Shokudo / Musubieこども食堂・むすびえ
Red nacional (sede Tokio) · Nacional
A network of community canteens that reached a record 12,601 in 2025, outnumbering public high schools.
QUESTION (Kyoto Shinkin)クエスチョン
Kioto · Kansai
A community bank building conceived as a co-creation facility: coworking, a café, "Community Steps" and a communal kitchen on the eighth floor design…
Yatai de Fukuoka福岡屋台
Fukuoka · Kyushu
The only large Japanese city with a living street stall culture.
Spain5
Apadrina un Olivo
Oliete, Teruel · Aragón
Recovering 100,000 abandoned century-old olive trees in Oliete through citizen sponsorship: local jobs, an oil mill of their own and repopulation in…
Esta es una Plaza
Lavapiés, Madrid · Madrid
A lot abandoned for thirty years in Lavapiés turned by neighbours into a self-managed community garden: vegetable plots, open-air theatre, an exchang…
Geltoki
Pamplona · Navarra
Pamplona's former bus station converted into a space for social economy and sustainable food: a producers' market, a gastroteca, activities.
Huerto del Rey Moro
Sevilla · Andalucía
A community garden in a historic void of Seville's old town, self-managed by neighbours: urban agroecology, free play and territorial memory in the h…
Sociedades gastronómicas (txokos)
Donostia y todo Euskadi · País Vasco
Collective kitchens where members cook, eat and talk as equals: the vernacular gastronomic third place par excellence, with over a century of history.
France8
Darwin Écosystème
Bordeaux · Nouvelle-Aquitaine
A former 19th-century military barracks, handed over in 2008 and transformed since 2011 into an ecological transition ecosystem with coworking space,…
L'Hermitage
Autrêches · Hauts-de-France
A former 30-hectare farm estate in the Oise forest, bought in 2017 by a citizen initiative that brought together 850 people and a crowdfunding campai…
La Cagette
Montpellier · Occitanie
A cooperative and participatory supermarket opened in 2017, run by more than 5,500 members who are at once owners, customers and volunteer workers.
La Cité Fertile
Pantin · Île-de-France
A third place established since 2018 in a former SNCF goods station in Pantin, with a vegetable garden, greenhouse, brewery and coworking space devot…
La Louve
París · Île-de-France
Paris's first cooperative and participatory supermarket, opened in 2016 in the 18th arrondissement, inspired by the Park Slope Food Coop in New York.
Le Champ Commun
Augan · Bretagne
A cooperative created in late 2009 in Augan, a village of 1,500 people in central Brittany, to sustain local shops in a rural area affected by the di…
Italy18
Casa delle AgriCulture Tullia e Gino
Castiglione d'Otranto (Lecce) · Puglia
An association founded in 2013 in a village in the Salento to reclaim more than fifteen hectares of abandoned land lent free of charge by their owner…
Cascina Cuccagna
Milán · Lombardia
This 17th-century farmhouse, municipal property since 1984, was abandoned and declared uninhabitable in the 1990s.
Castel del Giudice
Castel del Giudice (Isernia) · Molise
A small mountain municipality in the Alto Molise that in the early 2000s launched, under mayor Lino Gentile, a regeneration model based on a combinat…
Comunità di San Benedetto al Porto
Génova · Liguria
The priest Andrea Gallo founded this Christian base community in the port of Genoa in 1970 to take in people struggling with addiction, homeless peop…
Cooperativa di Comunità dei Sibillini
Comunanza (Ascoli Piceno) · Marche
After the 2016 earthquake in central Italy, Slow Food promoted in Comunanza, a municipality of around 3,000 people in the Marche Apennines, the creat…
Cooperativa Placido Rizzotto
San Giuseppe Jato (Palermo) · Sicilia
The first cooperative of the Libera Terra project, founded in November 2001 to legally farm more than two hundred hectares confiscated from mafia bos…
What they share: Eating with others remains the oldest and most direct way of making community.