26/03 Challenges of the agroecological transition at the scale of the food system: social movements, local administrations and political cycles

In recent decades, Madrid has been the scene of an enormous number of agroecological initiatives, which have turned the city into a laboratory of socio-territorial innovation capable of articulating political activism, co-production of knowledge and institutional and community management. This network of practices and actors, whose conceptual focus has been the notion of urban commons, has proven capable of materializing relevant advances in the city’s food sovereignty, but also in its level of social justice.

The objective of this workshop, which is an activity framed in the project financed by the Community of Madrid (R&D activity programs with reference PHS-2024/PH-HUM-336 and acronym LOGCOMMONS-CM), is to approach this lively network of practices from an academic perspective. Particularly, contribute to the construction of a story co-constructed with its protagonists of the trajectories, learnings and tensions of the agroecological movement in the city of Madrid. We understand that this exercise is especially important today, when within this dynamic there coexist processes of partial institutionalization, new cooperative infrastructures, growing urban pressure, changes in municipal governance models and challenges derived from the economic and social sustainability of the projects.

Thus, the key question that this workshop aims to answer is: how has Madrid—its urban planning, its public policies, its management of public space—conditioned the possibilities of growth, permanence or transformation of agroecological processes? Practicing answers to this question is essential not only to understand the trajectories of the network of agroecological practices and actors, but also to guide its strategic decisions and anticipate difficulties and guide strategic decisions and latent potentialities not yet exploited.

The workshop “Agroecology in Madrid: trajectories, learning and horizons” will be organized around four monthly meetings that will bring together researchers of recognized prestige in this field who, at the same time, are and have been leaders of the agroecological movement. The sessions will be organized around a common repertoire of questions that will facilitate the construction of a comparative analysis of different experiences of the Madrid agroecological movement and the construction of a corpus of reflection and readings shared among those attending the workshop.