From family heritage to living cities: the case for diaspora co-investment in edible cities

August 8, 2026

Yesterday, VIVACE completed the structuring of a co-investment between families who, remarkably, share the same surname but live between at least five countries, with different languages, religions and daily lives, in Bamberg, Germany. It’s a small transaction, but it points to a bigger question: how can families whose histories crossed borders come together to invest in the places that shaped them?

The edible city

Germany has been experimenting for over a decade with the Essbare Stadt, or “edible city” — turning public green space into productive land. Andernach is the reference case: since 2010, under the slogan Pflücken erlaubt (“picking allowed”), the city has converted roughly 8,000 square metres in its centre and 13 hectares on its outskirts into permaculture plots and public gardens, with a different crop showcased each year — 101 tomato varieties in 2010, 100 bean varieties in 2011. It’s won a gold medal at Entente Florale and helped found the EU’s Edible Cities Network, now linking Andernach with Rotterdam, Oslo, Havana and Guangzhou.

The results are genuinely mixed, and worth being honest about. A Leibniz Institute study comparing Andernach with Munich’s more hands-on Krautgärten found Andernach residents actually use the food less, largely because fewer are actively involved in growing it. The takeaway isn’t that the model fails — it’s that the benefit depends on how deliberately participation is designed in. Infrastructure alone doesn’t create belonging.

Bamberg has its own version: around 30 public raised beds maintained collectively by residents, functioning as much as intergenerational meeting points as food sources.

The point isn’t gardening. It’s what an urban space can produce beyond ornament — food, biodiversity, and a reason for people to show up together.

The idea of pressing ordinary ground into food production isn’t new — it just used to go by a different name. During both World Wars, backyard and park plots dug to ease pressure on the food supply started out being called “war gardens.” By the time each war ended, the same plots were being called “victory gardens” instead — proof that what began as a wartime necessity had become a habit worth keeping. The Essbare Stadt is asking a version of the same question in peacetime: land pressed into service by circumstance once, staying in service by choice.

Family capital, applied locally

Edible cities don’t need to be funded only by municipalities. Family capital — patient, local, personal — is a natural fit, and the money is already moving this way: most global family offices now back impact-oriented deals, and investment into regenerative agriculture grew roughly twenty-six-fold between 2018 and 2020. That’s exactly the scale — a garden, an orchard, a few hectares — where family money can do what institutional funds and government budgets can’t: stay small, stay local, stay personal.

A family, or several, could invest together in a garden, orchard or small agricultural project — financing land, trees, irrigation, or a community space — with each member contributing differently: capital from one, land from another, agricultural knowledge from a third, a local partner to manage the work day to day. The return isn’t purely financial. It’s ecological, social, and — for a diaspora family — deeply personal.

Why diaspora families in particular

Migration, war, and persecution have separated countless families from the places their histories run through. The descendants now live in Paris, New York, Tel Aviv, Latin America — distant from the original place, but not disconnected from it.

A Jewish family with German roots investing alongside German families to restore land in a historic city. Italian diaspora families backing orchards in the towns their grandparents left. Lebanese families supporting the preservation of traditional crops and water systems. Irish families funding heritage orchards tied to ancestral regions.

The family behind the Bamberg investment has ties that reach further still, to Africa, and part of what draws them to this model is extending it there directly — partnering with local farmers rather than simply exporting a European idea south. The interest runs both ways: building food and economic security on both ends of the relationship, using the family’s own roots on two continents as the starting point rather than treating it as capital flowing outward in one direction.

What makes it work

The research on edible cities points to a few practical lessons for structuring this kind of investment:

• Give it visible ownership. A bed or row tied to a specific branch of the family draws more engagement than an undifferentiated shared plot.

• Fund a local operator. A family spread across continents can’t tend the land itself — a local gardener or organisation is part of the return, not just a cost.

• Build in a reason to return. An annual harvest, a planting weekend, a shared log between visits — something that keeps a dispersed family connected to the asset.

• Track more than yield. Visits, volunteer hours, and intergenerational participation matter as much as what’s harvested.

Memory into stewardship

The Bamberg project carries particular weight because of the families involved. German and Jewish history carries the weight of one of Europe’s darkest periods, and a garden doesn’t undo that. But descendants choosing to co-invest in land, in growth, in a shared future — that’s a real choice about what to do with inherited history. Not to forget it, but to build past it, together.

Bamberg sits less than an hour from Nuremberg, where the Straße der Menschenrechte — the Way of Human Rights — runs past the Germanisches Nationalmuseum: 27 white columns, designed by Israeli artist Dani Karavan, each inscribed with an article of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in German and one other language. Karavan called it not a memorial but a street people walk through. It sits, deliberately, in the city of the Nuremberg Laws and the Reichsparteitage. Yiddish has a word for what both places are reaching for, in very different registers: mentshlekhkeit — ordinary human decency, practiced rather than declared. Twenty-seven columns of human-rights text ask more of a visitor than a raised bed of tomatoes does. But both put the same question to the ground: what do we build here, together, so it holds people instead of dividing them.

That’s where the Essbare Stadt stops being an urban-planning idea and becomes something closer to a framework for reconciliation through shared work.

An investment that transmits meaning, not just wealth

A traditional investment returns capital. This kind of investment returns capital, relationships, biodiversity, and knowledge at once — and it’s arriving at a moment when generational succession, more than any market trend, is pushing family capital toward exactly this kind of purpose-linked structure.

At VIVACE, we think the next generation of sustainable investment will be less about buying assets and more about asking what an asset can become: an abandoned plot into an orchard, a family property into a community space, a history of separation into a partnership in regeneration.

Sometimes that starts with something simple: plant something together, and let the next generation inherit the garden.

CPM