Growing up, I used to walk around the allotments – those small city gardens – to see if any vegetables or fruit hanging over the fence could be put into my belly.

I revisited that habit recently, snacking on yellow plums that had begun transforming into jam on the pavement (I went for the ones still round but perfectly ripe). Some gardeners volunteer their harvest, putting apples in boxes on the streets with a little sign saying to “take some”.

Urban foraging is hardly new, although collaborative maps and edible-city projects have made it far more visible.

Falling Fruit is one such map. Launched in 2013, it shows where there's food up for grabs in cities across the globe.

I looked up the closest edible location to me in Brussels on the map – it was a Carrefour dumpster, with a little comment in French: “Some Monday or Thursday evenings, a black container containing bread and sometimes other items.” Alright, how about something offering a more classic foraging experience? There – a pear tree, 37 minutes away on foot.

Falling Fruit combines locations added by users with existing datasets, particularly municipal tree inventories, so it can include all sorts of fruit trees, plants, and edible bounty that can be foraged. The project deliberately focuses on cities rather than encouraging more people into already strained wild ecosystems.

Cities are landscapes we design, says Falling Fruit's executive director Ethan Welty. “We’re already choosing what to put there. And we could choose more edible food-bearing species,” he told us.

But whose food is it? Falling Fruit marks whether a tree is public, overhangs public space, or sits on private land but is listed with the owner's permission. But ownership can still get messy. A fruit tree may stand on municipal land, for instance, while clearly being cared for by the resident next door. Or it may hang over a fence, dropping fruit that's already rotting on the pavement. In such cases, before putting the location on the edible city map, Welty encourages users to use common sense and take “what seems right.”

In Vienna, non-profit ObstStadt Wien works with the city to maintain 10 public fruit meadows with around 300 trees. It began in 2016 with 30 fruit trees on the Danube Island, Victoria Matejka, chair of ObstStadt, told us. The city has since offered more public land than the small team can currently manage.

“These trees don’t belong to the people who plant them and who care for them, but to everyone. So everyone can come and have fruit,” Matejka said.

There's one rule: “Only harvest as much as you can carry in your two hands, so that there is enough for others,” she explained. ObstStadt calls it fair-use harvesting.

There are signs that explain the system in five languages, and each tree has a small plaque showing what type of tree it is and who cares for it. Matejka says finding local volunteers to be “godparents” looking after the trees has generally been easy, as many already use the parks every day.

Other European cities have similar projects. In Stockholm, the municipality runs small apple orchards throughout the city from which anyone can harvest – just not too much. The orchard's official instructions remind people that others want to make apple pie too.

In Andernach, Germany, the municipality has been developing an “edible city” since 2010, planting vegetables, herbs, and fruit in public greenery with a welcoming “picking allowed” policy instead of “keep off”.

The relationship between trees and cities is about more than bearing fruit. Research across 293 European cities in 2021 found that the surfaces of tree-covered areas in Central Europe were 8-12°C cooler on average than roofs, roads, and other built-up surfaces during summer and periods of extreme heat.

After this summer's heatwaves, some of ObstStadt's trees didn't survive, Matejka said, and the group is now testing which fruit trees are better able to cope with the heat.

Between 2021 and 2024, the ARBRES project in Brussels studied which fruit trees can withstand the city’s changing climate, where to plant them, and how to share harvests. The planting continues: Brussels residents can sign up for collective purchases through the eco-organisation Velt, buy fruit trees and shrubs at a group rate, and plant them themselves. Velt says almost 9,500 have been sold this way, and it's currently organising another collective purchase.

Is city-grown fruit safe? ARBRES looked into that, analysing around 270 fruit samples collected across Brussels to see how contaminated they were. They found heavy metal levels broadly comparable to commercially sold fruit, dropping significantly after washing. The best advice: wash what you pick.

Julius E. O. Fintelmann contributed to this story.

There are also EU-level efforts to rethink urban nature. Under the Nature Restoration Regulation, member states are required to halt the loss urban green space and tree cover by 2030, and increase both starting in 2031. None of this requires cities to make that greenery edible, but why shouldn't it? Our cities could be much tastier.