Europe’s flagship programme for research and innovation, driving sustainable growth, global collaboration, and technological excellence.
About
Horizon Europe is the EU’s main funding programme for research and innovation, with a 2021–2027 budget of EUR 93.5 billion. It addresses climate change, supports the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals, and drives EU competitiveness and growth.
The programme fosters collaboration, strengthens the impact of research in shaping EU policies, and promotes the creation and spread of excellent knowledge and technologies. It also creates jobs, boosts economic growth, and supports industrial competitiveness within a stronger European Research Area.
Entities from the EU and associated countries can take part.
Bringing a cultural dimension to the European Green Deal through the transformative power of food heritage.
Programme
CONVIVIUM is a coalition of public and private European partners aiming to add a cultural dimension to the European Green Deal by harnessing the material, symbolic, and social power of food. As a shared and vital experience, food is viewed as “living heritage” that reflects societal change and supports local well-being.
Drawing on the spirit of the New European Bauhaus, CONVIVIUM promotes sustainability and social transformation through food heritage. It delivers cultural-based solutions such as eco-aligned design prototypes for farmers, food-focused cultural events, inclusive organizational models, and digital tools to embed food heritage in institutions.
This mission is supported by strong collaborative, scientific, and technical foundations, ensuring that solutions are grounded in local community needs, modern research, and the synergy of tradition and innovation.
Bringing a cultural dimension to the European Green Deal through the transformative power of food heritage.
Locations
Flanders (BE)
Home to several UNESCO world heritage sites. Deeply agricultural, Flanders has over 23,000 farms despite its small geographical area. Densely populated, Flanders also hosts a diverse migrant and student population.
Gdańsk (PL)
Gdańsk is over a thousand years old, regarded as a symbolic place for the outbreak of the Second World War, as well as the start of the communist collapse in Central Europe. Gdańsk is a city of many cultural influences and geographical hybridity.
The Lofoten Islands (NO)
Included in the Norwegian Tentative List for inclusion as UNESCO World Heritage (since 2002).
Rotterdam (NL)
The biggest harbour of Europe and the most diverse city in the Netherlands has a multicultural population, largely comprised of minorities from around the globe, with very different food heritages.
Basque Regions (FR, SP)
Cross-border regions sharing language, history, and viticultural, agricultural, and shepherding practices, each with distinct identities. Home to unique food and wine AOPs, the French and Spanish Basque regions hold great potential for cross-border diplomacy.
The city of Coimbra (PT)
University of Coimbra, Alta and Sofia: UNESCO World Heritage site (since 2013).
A transformative methodology rooted in empathy, co-labor, and more-than-human thinking, redefining food heritage through design, collaboration, and conviviality.
Methodologies
The key methodologies embrace a collaborative ethic grounded in shared heritage and conviviality, where collaboration means “co-labor” and individuals become “we”.
CONVIVIUM draws on the “ontological turn”, challenging fixed definitions and emphasizing that research and practice are relational and help shape the world. Scholars, creatives, and citizens actively participate in enacting new realities. This aligns with more-than-human thinking, which moves beyond human-centered perspectives to include the broader ecological community—plants, animals, ecosystems, and more—in decision-making.
This approach is central to redefining food heritage, inspired by the Zoöp model from the Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam, which promotes coexistence across all forms of life. CONVIVIUM’s solutions are also guided by design thinking and participative deliberation, using iterative, stakeholder-driven methods like workshops and forums. The main challenge—breaking away from dominant routines—is met through the consortium’s shared capacities in empathy, critical thinking, and solidarity.
Redefining food heritage as a driver of sustainability, cultural identity, inclusive economies, and citizen engagement with local ecosystems.
Objectives
SO1. To redefine food heritage (and cultural heritage at large)
In order to make food heritage more apt to address pressing ecological and societal challenges (e.g. climate change, loss of biodiversity, cultural loss, decreasing intergenerational contact and solidarity, and advances of intolerance and authoritarianism) a new action and research framework will be developed. CONVIVIUM draws on well-established cultural heritage models based on adscription (e.g. UNESCO’s Intangible Cultural Heritage, FAO’s Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems, or France’s Mission Française du Patrimoine et des Cultures Alimentaires) to progressively depart from them and produce one inclusive model of co-evolutive nature. This will be done through the systematic integration of the progress and outcomes of the actions proposed by the consortium, the championing of community involvement, and intersectoral dialogue and communication. Tools assessing the impact of the policy reports, open public events, white papers, and communication strategies which inform the new model will be developed.
SO2. To revitalize traditional, sustainable food practices
CONVIVIUM blends food tradition, sustainability, and innovation to develop green and inclusive solutions for leveraging the full potential of food and agricultural landscapes, and the knowledge associated with them). These include the collaborative design, prototyping, and implementation of cultivable gardens and viticultural landscapes, a future-oriented and socially- inclusive kitchen, environmentally-friendly vineyard architecture, speculative storytelling, artistic exhibitions and performances, and a series of digital solutions addressing both the historical ties that make up community (some of them forgotten or at risk of being forgotten) and the timely ecological challenges affecting our food systems. Put together, these solutions seek to create experiences that generate a positive impact on European communities, which will be evaluated on the basis of the interest and acceptance of local communities, market promoters, and end users.
SO3. To establish food heritage as an important asset for culture, identity and inclusion, economy, tourism and territorial economic competitiveness
CONVIVIUM seeks to ensure the transformative impact of its renewed vision of food heritage beyond the project duration through the anchoring of its innovative solutions to cultural initiatives led by civil society organizations and to the economic activities of the food and tourism industries. This will be achieved through the careful identification of groups targeted by the solutions, the inclusion of interested stakeholders into the different stages of development of the solutions (so they respond to factual needs since their inception), and through effective strategies to attract stakeholder and consumer interest at the phase of implementation or market phase.
SO4. To position citizens as food heritage stakeholders by promoting the reconnection of people to their local ecosystems
CONVIVIUM recognizes that the ecological crisis is a cultural crisis; it is a crisis of relationship with the life surrounding us, and that and the way forward lies in building reciprocity, respect, and care into the ways we relate to each other and to the environment. The solutions proposed by CONVIVIUM uphold the aesthetic, sustainable and inclusive dimension of food to promote new modes of ecological bonding with the earth.3 CONVIVIUM will conduct art-based, scalable solutions in seeding, planting, tasting, and cooking; foster sustainable landscaping in cultivated lands and heritage sites through synergies between crafts and novel industrial techniques; and create immersive food experiences brought up by exhibitions and digital technologies for citizens to gain awareness of the interdependence of life forms and to appreciate food heritage as a kind of care that enables new ways of living together and a sense of belonging to the living community.
