Incredible Edible Todmorden: Impacts on Community Building, Education, and Local Culture. A Case for the Operationalization of a Sustainability-led Discourse

Abstract

This paper analyzes how Incredible Edible Todmorden (IET), a community-led project, operated notions of sustainability, through permaculture and urban farming, to focus on community building and the impacts it had on education and local culture. The research is informed by a framework encompassing Robin Hambleton’s notion of place and place-based identity, as well as notions of sustainability, discourse, and culture. The paper puts forth the argument that the discursive operationalization of sustainability, framed as a process of directed change, can produce important effects in community building, education, and local culture at a local level and suggests that the application of the framework may also yield results in the study of other sectors.