Blue Community Gardens win innovation award
Blue community gardens are one of three winners of the Circular Gastronomy Challenge. The prize is awarded to ideas that can accelerate the transition to a circular economy and contribute to a more sustainable food system.
"It's great that the jury sees potential in small-scale farming in the sea" says Maria Bodin, project coordinator at the University of Gothenburg.
The Circular Gastronomy Challenge innovation prize was awarded on Monday evening at a ceremony ín Stockholm.
With the motivation ‘For the idea of creating small-scale co-cultivation in the sea for fishermen, restaurateurs and private individuals - allotments that can both produce sustainable seafood, serve as a meeting place for the exchange of knowledge and raise awareness of sea farming’, Maria Bodin received the prize, which consists of a tailor-made innovation support to develop the idea in 2025.
"It will be exciting to see what project developers, sustainability experts and business developers have to propose to develop the concept of community blue gardens," says Maria Bodin.
Developing the restaurant industry
The aim of the prize is to recognise and support ideas that can accelerate the transition to a circular economy. Three winners were chosen from the 36 nominees. In addition to community blue gardens, the winners were compost soft drinks made from food waste and a business model based on creating ingredients on a large scale from recovered citrus peels.
"To win and receive innovation support, the idea must be relevant to the restaurant industry, be able to contribute to better utilisation of resources, be able to grow in size and become profitable, provide concrete and measurable benefits and have the potential to spread and thus influence more people in the restaurant industry, as well as other parts of the food system," says Per Styregård, co-founder of Circular Gastronomy and chair of the jury.
On display in Malmö
Maria Bodin, together with the City of Gothenburg, has initiated the Flytevi blue community garden in central Gothenburg. A model of Flytevi is now on display in an exhibition on the sustainable communities of the future at the Form/Design Centre in Malmö. The exhibition Visions of The Futures We Build brings together four interdisciplinary teams to present their visions of a future where the built environment sector in Sweden has achieved common sustainability goals. Under the theme Waves, Flytevi is showcased as an example of a sustainable, circular solution that can be implemented in practice.
- ‘It is incredibly exciting that Flytevi is part of the vision work in community development, an important arena for inspiring and spreading knowledge about sustainable cultivation in the sea,’ says Maria Bodin.
The exhibition opens with a vernissage on 30 January and runs until 16 March 2025.
Text: Karl-Johan Nylén
Flytevi is a future prototype and educational platform in the centre of Gothenburg. On site in Frihamnen, visitors can learn more about small-scale farming and food from the sea. The Centre for Sea and Society at the University of Gothenburg organises lessons where secondary school pupils learn more about how farming at sea works, where theory is interspersed with practical elements such as taking water samples and measuring visibility.
The allotment was inaugurated in November 2022 and is the first urban marine cultivation in Sweden. Flytevi has been implemented as part of Vinnova's Future Prototypes initiative in a broad collaboration and a close exchange of knowledge between the City of Gothenburg and the University of Gothenburg, where urban planners, architects, marine biologists, researchers and students have participated.
