Activating the University’s Public Agency: Towards a Campus Food Hub in Trieste

In recent years, numerous food practices, projects, and policies have emerged within universities across various contexts. These initiatives often involve the redesign of innovative foodspaces – such as ecological canteens, social farms, community gardens, alternative food markets, and food labs. In some cases, they address the sustainability of the university food system through more comprehensive research projects, developing tools, strategies, and policies to improve food-related aspects at multiple levels. These projects often also aim to meet the food-related needs of university communities (including personal and subjective dimensions such as allergies, religion, culture, and dietary preferences), and to activate the university’s public agency by promoting good practices (such as healthy and sustainable diets, food waste reduction, and sourcing from local farmers) thus generating ripple effects that extend beyond campus into the city, exploring food as a lens through which to guarantee a broader range of rights, including the “right to food.” Investigating the relationship between the food systems-universities relationship also invites design disciplines, at various scales, to take a more active role in food studies. Foodspaces, in this sense, can be conceived as places where food acts as a mediator of urban collective life, linking food-related dimensions such as health, rights, and the environment. In the Italian context, an increasing number of universities are experimenting with their food-related agency. Some are emerging as active drivers of food change within the institution – by implementing downscaling strategies and reducing the distance between food production and consumption – and as urban actors, networking (with) local food actors and therefore amplifying their impact through upscaling strategies. These experiences also highlight how university-led food initiatives can help reshaping spatial relationships between spaces, people, and practices, both within university communities and across urban and territorial contexts, with multiplying effects that go beyond campus borders. This paper aims to lay the groundwork for exploring the potential role of a food hub at the University of Trieste. It investigates how such a hub might reshape the university’s relationship with the urban environment, contribute to the reconfiguration of (at least part of) the local food system, while questioning the ethical role of the university at the intersection of space and urban community.