VEIL Food Map

The VEIL foodmap is an online, urban food production map of Melbourne.

The purpose of the VEIL food map is to:

• Record the quantity and variety of urban food production present within Melbourne
• Encourage Melbournians to contribute data to this site
• Act as a database for people to base the design of new products & services towards greater sustainability in Melbourne
• Provide evidence that urban food production currently exists within Melbourne in order to foster greater policy support of this industry

The type of produce to be recorded on this web site is food that is primary produce, ie. fresh & not value-added/ processed, which are predominately larger than household production. Examples of urban food production include: community gardens, commercial production and market gardens, shared private gardens, and food produced on public space.

The new VEIL Foodmap has been created using the internet mapping application at VictoriaMyCommunity.org.  The site and application is,

"... a collaborative, locality based, community network, that allows you to connect with services, resources and groups in your community. The site uses a locality based interface that makes it easy to see whats happening in your area. Find resources, community groups, services, and events, discuss and rate information others have added, or add information about your community that others would find useful."  From VictoriaMyCommunity.org's Welcome page

VictoriaMyCommunity started with the idea to build a collaborative, locality based, information network, a platform that can be customised and focussed on a particular topic in a particular area, but allows that information to be highly accessible to anyone wishing to use it. By building a platform that can serve multiple purposes we can build a shared community resource that provides greater cross promotion between initiatives and is itself more organisationally and financialy sustainable.

To this end, a number of local community groups have joined forces to work towards this. Currently Friends of the Earth Melbourne, CERES Envrionment Park, the Victorian Eco Inovation Lab and the Australian Centre for Democracy and Justice have been central to the project.

What all this means is that anyone can use VictoriaMyCommunity.org to create their own maps of their own communities so have a look and get mapping!

And finally we would like to add our thanks to Lukas Berk without who this application and project would not have been possible.