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Urbanization processes are accompanied by growing global challenges for food systems. Urban actors are increasingly striving to address these challenges through a focus on sustainable diets. However, transforming food systems towards more sustainable diets is challenging and it is unclear what the local scope of action might be. Co-production of knowledge between science and non-science is particularly useful for analysing context-specific solutions and promise to result in more robust socio-economic, political and technical solutions. Thus, this paper aims to integrate different types and sources of knowledge to understand urban food systems transformation towards a more sustainable diet in Vienna; and, second, to analyse and reflect on the difficulties and ways forward to integrate diverse actors’ perspectives, multiple methods and epistemologies. We created different future scenarios that illustrate the synergies and trade-offs of various bundles of measures and the interactions among single dimensions of sustainable diets. These scenarios show that there is plenty of scope for local action, but co-ordination across diverse groups, interests, and types of knowledge is necessary to overcome lock-ins.

To cope with the impacts of shifts in food consumption patterns required to reduce environmental problems, farmers will have to adapt at farm level. We explore farmers’ intentions and preferred options to adapt in the metropolitan region of Vienna, Austria, in response to changed food demand among the Viennese population. In doing so, we consider changed food consumption patterns for (1) regional food, (2) organic food, and (3) meat in several scenarios. By applying the contingent behavior method to farmers in a survey, we assess farm adaptations with respect to production orientation (crop and livestock production patterns) and production mode (conventional or organic). The results show that, depending on the farm type, farmers tend to make specific contextual adaptations in production orientation. Accordingly, less specialized farmers are more likely to employ transformative adaptations. Most farmers who adapt production orientation, however, tend to employ incremental adaptations, i.e., extensions of what is already done. A logit model indicates that, among changed food consumption patterns, increasing regional food consumption is the most influential factor in farmers’ decision to adapt production orientation. Different adaptation paths were generated demonstrating the need for coordinated policy measures that consider the diversity of the different farm types to further encourage farm adaptations and reduce environmental risks associated with modern farming.

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