Urban food systems are increasingly recognised as arenas for addressing climate resilience, food security, social inclusion and sustainable urban development. Yet food-related planning responsibilities often remain fragmented across municipal departments, market regulations, environmental policy and community initiatives. This research examines how community-based food initiatives and participatory governance processes generate planning-relevant knowledge for sustainable urban food transitions.

Drawing on qualitative research conducted within the SURFIT project in Kraków, Poland, the study combines insights from ten sustainable food initiatives and three multi-stakeholder workshops involving farmers, market organisers, municipal officers, public institutions, NGOs and researchers. Using a transition-oriented and relational perspective, it analyses how grassroots food networks create, translate and scale their impact through everyday practices, community engagement, institutional collaboration and access to urban infrastructures.

The findings show that sustainable food initiatives function not only as alternative forms of food provision, but also as socio-spatial infrastructures of learning, participation and urban experimentation. Their transformative potential depends on multiple scaling pathways, including horizontal diffusion, cultural change, institutional recognition and embedding within broader governance arrangements. At the same time, these processes remain shaped by resource fragility, regulatory constraints, uneven access to space and selective institutional recognition.

The research contributes to debates on community engagement, co-production and environmental planning by showing how urban food initiatives can help “build planning up” from situated practices and relational forms of knowledge. It argues that planning scholarship can benefit from treating food networks as relational spaces where future urban food systems are imagined, negotiated and practiced.