The Picasso Food Forest is an urban community managed food forest that has developed from the citizen movement, Fruttorti di Parma. Within an area of 4500 m2, fruit and vegetables are produced and harvested directly from plants. This healthy food is accessible to all and helps to promote healthy eating habits. The food forest was created on previously abandoned land which now provides a flourishing recreational and educational greenspace for the local community.
The Picasso Food Forest was the first experimental model of an urban food forest in Parma, and possibly within Italy as a whole. It is a form of “public park” in which trees and plants, not only provide aesthetic functions, shade and oxygen, but also provide food for the people living in the area. Residents and visitors have the opportunity to follow the development of the forest ecosystem through the years and across the different seasons. Fruttorti di Parma takes its inspiration from agro-ecology, agroforestry and permaculture; a design approach for creating sustainable human settlements by imitating natural systems. It developed as a spontaneous and informal citizens’ movement which was established in Parma in 2012. The aim of the group has been to create more greenspaces across the city of Parma. These should be accessible to all local inhabitants, whilst being rich in biodiversity and providing locations for producing healthy and free food. Newly created greenspaces are also intended to be places to relax, places for children to play, places to chat, places for learning and for sharing produce from the food forest.
The group wishes to create an urban network of food forests in which plants will provide food for local people whilst offering a habitat similar to a natural one, whereby natural processes regulate the entire system. When we look at natural processes, we can see that natural woodlands don’t require human intervention to remain healthy; e.g. they don’t require irrigation, fertilisation, ploughing, herbicides or pesticides. In effect, natural processes and cycles maintain the soil fertility and the health of the plants. By copying these processes, and by integrating plants which are useful to humans within the ecosystem, it is possible to create efficient human designed food production systems. These require significantly less resources than those currently required by industrial agriculture, thereby contributing to the improvement of the soil and the habitat rather than causing erosion and destruction.
A food forest attempts to imitate natural processes and functions typical of an immature woodland ecosystem. While a mature forest is made up mainly by big trees and a closed canopy that leaves little light penetration, an immature woodland is characterised by trees of different size and height, shrubs, herbaceous plants and areas with different levels of shade and light. These offer a wide variety of ecological niches and high productivity. The Picasso Food Forest also provides an important habitat to promote biodiversity: more than 300 animal species have been identified, ranging from birds to insects. Same numbers for plant species including cultivated and volunteering plants. It is a place for citizens to connect, to learn and practice agroecology and to share their ideas on sustainability, self-sufficiency, community resilience and empowerment.