A Better World by Design, the internationally acclaimed student-run conference on reshaping the built environment, wants to your ideas for eliminating urban food deserts.

What is a food desert? Quite simply, it is a geographic area with limited access to fresh, nutritious, or locally-sourced food. Obstacles to the elimination of food deserts include availability, price, proximity of sources, transportation and preservation of goods, poor environment for local farming, and lack of awareness or education.

Smart and healthy cities need accessible nutrition. How is your city addressing food deserts? What innovations have you seen in sourcing and distributing food? A Better World by Design, in partnership with IBM’s Smarter Cities Scan, is searching for practical, efficient, and visionary solutions to various aspects of the food desert problem. You can submit a post right on this Tumblr site, send it via email to smartercities@tumblr.com, or if you have a Tumblr site, just tag your post “bxdfood” and we’ll reblog it from your site to the Smarter Cities Scan.

This effort is part of the 2010 Better World Challenge, an international design competition in which the top ideas will be implemented locally in Providence, RI with the support of the municipal government.

The three most popular posts, based on the number of “likes” and “reblogs” received, will be shown in front of our audience of hundreds of global innovators and broadcast live on the web on the afternoon of October 3, just before we reveal the winner of the Better World Challenge!

A Better World by Design is an annual conference at Brown University and RISD that connects students, professionals, and individuals from a variety of disciplines to build a global community of socially conscious and passionate innovators. Find out how you can attend or watch our live stream October 1-3 at www.abetterworldbydesign.com.