The Food SystemiCity programme, led by the Viikki Food Design Factory at the University of Helsinki, considers the transition into local, more sustainable food systems an emerging possibility for new business creation within the urban built environment. It positions buildings, neighborhoods, and everyday urban infrastructures as potential scenes for novel types of local food production, distribution, nutrient recycling, and food‑related community building.
Integrating these activities into city spaces opens up new opportunities for industries previously outside the food sector, especially when collaborating with innovative agrifood and tech companies. However, venture building across non-adjacent sectors requires effective matchmaking and facilitated co-creation.
At the heart of Food SystemiCity is a structured co‑creation process, which Viikki Food Design Factory developed to help actors grasp emerging opportunities across sector boundaries, and give them a shape of a new offering. The process is designed to assist multi-actor teams consisting of startups, established companies, primary producers, researchers, city actors, and/or built‑environment professionals to jointly develop systemic food innovations that are environmentally resilient, economically viable, and socially grounded.
The Food SystemiCity co‑creation process progresses from early concepting to piloting and evaluation. It begins with a facilitated concepting workshop, where participating actors form “linkage teams” and build a shared understanding of goals, resources, and constraints. Through joint opportunity scanning, teams identify promising combinations of urban spaces and food‑related functions, such as urban farming, local distribution, or nutrient upcycling, while mapping challenges and boundary conditions.
These insights are then translated into concrete, multi‑actor concepts that define value creation, operating models, roles, and success metrics. In the next phase, teams receive expert mentoring and then move into pilot planning, where responsibilities, resources, and learning objectives are clarified. Finally, pilots are evaluated using a triple bottom line perspective—economic, environmental, and social—to support informed decisions on scaling, refinement, or redirection.
As a facilitation method for future-proof joint venture building between the built environment and agrifood sectors, the Food SystemiCity co-creation process is an innovative business creation tool aimed at producing systemically sustainable solutions. Dedicated for this purpose, it supports emissions reduction, biodiversity regeneration, nutrient cycling, and better access to nutritious food, while fostering new partnerships and business models that create lasting value for cities and citizens.