This research project investigates how an edible urban commons is constituted through everyday circular R-behaviours. Beyond reducing food waste, practices such as food rescue, redistribution, and composting foster alternative forms of collective provisioning. While emerging ground-up initiatives aimed at recuperating food waste are frequently framed in relation to zero-waste circular food transitions, they are rarely conceptualised as pathways towards a more community-sufficient, commons-based edible urbanism. We argue that food commoning practices do more than reconfiguring material-social relations, they also enact alternative forms of futuring by foregrounding care, sufficiency, and collective stewardship over extractive, growth-oriented food systems. In this sense, everyday acts of revalorising food waste prefigure more resilient and equitable urban food futures, including providing a modest, localised buffer against global shocks in food systems. Building on this premise, the paper advances the nascent scholarship on circular urban commoning by bringing debates on circular food transitions into productive dialogue with the concept of an edible commons. Conceptualising food waste as an edible commons from the bottom up also offers insights for rethinking how urban food futures are governed and imagined, with implications for policy domains ranging from climate mitigation to social resilience.

PI & Co-PIs: Tim Bunnell, Brenda S.A. Yeoh BFA, Shahmir Hassan Ali and Karin Aue
Collaborators: Mark Teo Shan Chian, Zheng Renjie and Jeffrey T.K. Valino Koh
NUS Team: Tan Qian Hui

Funding Agency: Ministry of Education Academic Research Fund Tier 1
Project Duration: 15 February 2026 – 31 March 2027