"You do not have to be 'in need' to take food.
Sharing works only when everyone is welcome."
Freeing the Food
Johanna Cepeda Hess Shreya Shrinivas Deshpande Thore Flynn Hadre Dide Su Unluakin
Student
Johanna Cepeda Hess Shreya Shrinivas Deshpande Thore Flynn Hadre Dide Su Unluakin Academic staff
Teresa Palmieri Jacopo Ammendola Sonia Cabral Matos Mustapha El Moussaoui Course
Bolzano Open City Laboratory Program
MA Eco-Social Design Semester
2025/26 WS Freeing the Food investigates food as a commons and questions current food systems that prioritize profit over collective care.
This inquiry is translated into practice through the creation of public food-sharing shelves, enabling non-monetary exchange based on solidarity and self-organization.
Food-sharing shelf installed at Spazio77, Bolzano.
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"Take What You Need, Give What You Can."
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Interactive map installed at the GOG.
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To activate these shelves, a participatory mapping workshop was hosted, inviting the community to identify food flows, potential shelf locations, and further speculations.
These interventions aim to cultivate a community-oriented perspective on food, fostering imagination, and alternative food systems.
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Mapping functions as a collective act, producing a commons shaped and expanded by the community:
-> Access the Freeing the Food Digital Map
-> Join the Freeing the Food Community WhatsApp Group
A project made in the course
Bolzano Open City Laboratory
“The question of what kind of city we want cannot be divorced from the question of what kind of people we want to be, what kind of social relations we seek, what relations to nature we cherish, what style of life we desire, what aesthetic values we hold” (Harvey, 2012). Staring from these considerations, the course took the form of an “Open City Laboratory”. In the first phase of the course, we listened to and oriented ourselves towards what Bolzano has to offer and what it might need. Critically reflecting on our encounters with the city and its actors, we detected possible spaces for intervention and developed situated proposals for eco-social transformations in Bolzano.
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