NABOLAGSHAGER AS

Their core work

NABOLAGSHAGER AS — whose name translates directly from Norwegian as "Neighborhood Gardens" — is an Oslo-based SME that designs and implements urban food growing initiatives at the neighbourhood scale. Their core work involves creating edible city solutions: turning underused urban spaces into productive community gardens while engaging residents as active participants in local food production. In European research projects, they function as a practice-based partner, contributing real-world implementation experience from a Nordic urban context to large consortia testing how cities can transform their food systems. Both their projects are Innovation Actions, meaning they work on deploying and validating solutions on the ground, not just studying them.

What they specialise in

How they've shifted over time

Their H2020 trajectory shows a progression from site-specific edible city implementation toward broader food system thinking. EdiCitNet (from 2018) kept the focus tight: growing food in cities, making urban spaces edible. By the time FoodE launched in 2020, the framing had expanded to encompass city-region food systems, citizen science methodologies, and responsible research frameworks — a shift from "how do we grow food here" to "how do entire urban food systems function and who participates in shaping them." This suggests the organisation is developing a more strategic, policy-relevant angle on urban food alongside its grassroots implementation roots.

NABOLAGSHAGER appears to be moving from hands-on urban gardening practice toward a broader role as an urban food systems actor engaged with citizen participation and research governance — making them increasingly relevant to European Green Deal and farm-to-fork agendas.

How they like to work

NABOLAGSHAGER has never led an H2020 project — they always join as a participant, contributing from a practitioner position within large, multi-partner consortia. With 63 unique partners from 16 countries across just two projects, they are clearly embedded in expansive, pan-European networks rather than small specialist clusters. This profile suggests they are valued for what they bring from the Oslo context: real community garden operations and local engagement experience that larger academic or policy partners cannot replicate themselves.

Despite only two projects, NABOLAGSHAGER has built a notably wide network — 63 partners across 16 countries — reflecting the large-consortium nature of both EdiCitNet and FoodE. Their connections span urban research institutions, city authorities, and food system actors across Northern, Western, and Southern Europe.

What sets them apart

NABOLAGSHAGER occupies a rare position as a private Norwegian company that translates urban gardening and community food practice directly into EU-funded research projects — bridging grassroots neighbourhood work and formal innovation consortia. Their Oslo base gives them credibility in a city consistently cited as a Nordic sustainability benchmark, which carries weight in European consortia seeking diverse, high-performing urban case studies. For a consortium building a project on urban food, local food production, or participatory city transitions, they offer something most universities and research institutes cannot: a company that actually runs neighbourhood gardens.

Highlights from their portfolio

• EdiCitNet
  Their largest and earliest H2020 project (EUR 205,367), focused on building a pan-European network of edible city solutions — a rare example of community food growing scaled to an EU research infrastructure.
• FoodE
  Marks a conceptual expansion from urban gardens to city-region food systems, with explicit citizen science methodology — signalling NABOLAGSHAGER's evolution toward a more systemic food policy role.