Civic transition experiments targeting sustainable food production increasingly engage with edible cities aiming at providing free food on public urban spaces. To deepen the understanding regarding how transition experiments can build urban transformative capacities, this paper presents a transdisciplinary case study on two civic edible city initiatives and their measures to cooperatively initiate, innovate, and accelerate edible cities in Dresden (Germany). We identified the two key action areas “civic participation” and “cooperative area activation” covering ten key transition activities to illustrate the variety and content of a transformation towards an edible city. Based on expert interviews and document analyses, we evaluated their process progression by linking research from urban ecology with transformation science. By visualizing its quantitative results, common and distinct patterns of the edible city initiatives could be made visible. Overall, we found that the level of activity is highest in the key action area of “citizen participation”. In this context, both transition experiments had different but specific foci in terms of their key transition activities (i.e. education, activation of stakeholders), whereby activities related to civic empowerment and social cohesion were lacking in both cases. To re-shape narratives pertaining to land access, food production, and participation under the principles of justice, we suggest that transition experiments related to “civic participation” and “cooperative area activation” must be approached together. Our systematic assessment can then enable civic transition teams to strategically identify common goals that need to be prioritized for initiating, innovating, and accelerating urban edible commons.

针对可持续粮食生产的公民转型实验越来越多地与旨在在公共城市空间提供免费食物的可食用城市进行接触。为了加深对转型实验如何建立城市变革能力的理解，本文对德累斯顿（德国）的两项公民食用城市倡议及其合作启动、创新和加速食用城市的措施进行了跨学科案例研究。我们确定了“公民参与”和“合作领域激活”两个关键行动领域，涵盖十项关键转型活动，以说明向“食用城市”转型的多样性和内容。基于专家访谈和文献分析，我们通过将城市生态学研究与转型科学联系起来评估了他们的过程进展。通过可视化其定量结果，可以使“食用城市”举措的共同和独特模式变得可见。总体而言，我们发现“公民参与”这一关键行动领域的活动水平最高。在这种背景下，这两个转型实验在关键转型活动（即教育、利益相关者的激活）方面有着不同但具体的重点，而这两种情况都缺乏与公民赋权和社会凝聚力相关的活动。为了在正义原则下重塑有关土地获取、粮食生产和参与的叙述，我们建议必须同时进行与“公民参与”和“合作区域激活”相关的转型实验。然后，我们的系统评估可以使公民过渡团队能够战略性地确定需要优先考虑的共同目标，以启动、创新和加速城市可食用公共区域。