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Systems & Flows_SO 2_Q4_HC 3_Food & the City - Coggle Diagram
Systems & Flows_SO 2_Q4_HC 3_Food & the City
Hungry city (Carolyn Steel)
Food supply take a tremendous effort (we take it for granted)! .
Lateral (unorthodox; associatively) thinking:
Food determines our lifes & cities/spatial dimension. By looking holistic (integraal) we see connected phenomenons/systems/patterns, while they first looked seperate things
Grain came by boat (from country side further away), meet from farms around the city, so meat markets placed more on the outside, grain close to the Thames. These are now important streets/squares!
Pattern seems irrational (no symmetry etc.), but makes total sense seen through food in the city (supply)
Food has a gigantic social & physical impact on our lives & planet: strong relationship between Cities and food
We are the midle of a gastronomic revelution (art of delicious food & drinks), whining & dining, fancy specialized food shops, everywhere. On the other hand we have never spent less on food than now (20%, used to be much more)
Food industry & technology has supplied us with a great amount of (and great variety of) food that is cheap, while making the need for food appear unimportand
Duvel beer in China, restaurant in the desert (next to a ski slope)
Gastronomic revolution (art of good foods & drinks)
Availibility of good food/grennery
Brink = place where life stock (sheep) were sold
The Land
Contrary to this food industry, we imagine the countryside/rural area with a romantic vision (uncapable to feed our metropolises)
VS. current reality
Historic development of relationship between cities & the countryside
First cities
City & coutry combined (single entity)
Agriculture in the middle, city around this (temples, dwelling around farmlands, then the wall)
Classical time (Rome)
Exeption because of grain taxes (occupation of lands)
Medieval / Pre-industrial
Fresco painting in Sienna: effects of good government on city & country (look after your countryside, and it wil look after you)
Pre-industrial cities are compact because of physical difficulties:
how larger the city, how smaller the relative size of the hinterland, until it could no longer feed the city
Von Thünen model
: the isolated city
Transport determined the way the hinterland was arranged: the fresher the product, the closer (milk/vegetables closeby, meat further (could walk alive in to the city)
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Industrial
Technology removed the chain between cities & rural hinterland & linkage between city people & farmers started to disintegrate
Grain made the ancient city, meat the industrial one
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Solution (Carolyn Steel): Sitopia = food place
Nice try's for sustainable cities
Dongtan (Architect: Arup; London) = first ecocity
Integrated urbanism
(applying multiple disciplines in urban plan)
Village clusters = base
live, work, shop in the own neighbourhood and at least some food-factories/production in the city
Zero-waste
Recycle hub: strip incomming packaging & recyle on the spot
Has good elements (inside), but is still linked/dependent to the unsustainable outside system gloabal supply system/city)
Real green cities mean: not just physical form, but rethinking the way the city is fed
Green space fertallised by compast & waste water
Howard Garden city
Howerd thought about a rearrangement of the world/system: rural area & cities were connected (network of connected self supplying city states)
Land ownership meant to be for the community, meaning rent will fund public needs, if land value arose, city would get rich, not individuals
Only the circles (sattelite towns were realized, not system behind the model)
Alternative for the current power structure of food supply (not few big, network of small)
Who controls? the consumers (voting by buying)
Wouter Mensink: you can't buy a better world
More influence? system that joins leaves directly by it roots (decentralized)
Food network: get rid of monopolistic network (one-way system), no (equal) relationships
More farmers: impact of food = countryside (landscape = product of farming)
We must eat the view = smaller scale of the landscape
Grow your own food
Allotments for food production (18th century to help the poor), now in great demand
Often disruption needed to revail the food procution potential
Cuba: Government sponsored, all open space in suburbs converted into community-runned farms, Havana turned into a yield market-garden maze
Continous productive landscapes
Vertical farms
Rotterdam: vertical pig city (port; MVRDV): combine organic farming with concentration of production-activities & allow critical mass to solve problems (rycycling)?
Small answers (narratives)
Problems
Supplying the city
Waste
Pre-industrial city
(Golden age of the ecosystem/craddle-to-craddle)
Mostly organic waste, seen as valuable resource, so everything was re-used
Cities grew larger, system started to break down, partly due to problems (dirty, smelly, unhygenic etc.)
The great fire of London (1666)
Baroque plan (Wren), but urgency & complex land-ownership made it impossible to create sewage (hard to create with existing things -> properties reserved): same pattern was rebuild
Invention of toilets: water needed to go somewhere (underground), but pulled up: 1858 "The great Stink"& cholera
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food suplly was filled by the waste it did create
Urban disciplines are fragmented, not thinking in a holistic way about urbansim
Utopia's
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Makers could not see that big questions don't always need big answers
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Warn us for megalomania, mono-culture & simple answers because of constant failling:
With which discipline do you start? Climate, capitalism, urbanism?
FOOD CONNECTS ALL DISCIPLINES!
Markets & supermarkets
Powers of supermarkets:
Ability to sell cheap, reliable food, at any time (night)
control of the supply chain, not takeover of the street shops
These landscapes like Crick makes the existance of supermarkets possible (only see it with strikes)
Power away from farmers, to supermarktets & food production companies
Market places
only large public spaces: embraced every aspect of human existance simultaneously
(market -> country people), formal parties, revelutions, ritual space etc.
Industrial revelution
Authorities refuesed further licenses because of fear of losing control 17th century, so illagally shops appeared in buildings
High streets began to replace markets as food hubs in Britain (when the train came)
Lipton (WW1) concept of advertising
Creation of the
supermarket/mall- Victor Gruen
(post war)
rise of suburban landscapes:
American Dream & car depended
Consequence: dying of downtown
(abandoned/bad condition)
Vision Gruen: time old cities are over, feeling of togetherness/cozyness to the individual suburbia: Modern town square & social space: recreate urban program / High street indoors
What really happend
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How did Europa dealt with this trend?
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Video's/literature
Caroline Steel (TedTalk)
One of the great questions of today: how to feed a city
1/3 grain production is food for animals, not humans (not efficient). Massive production landscapes: most of us don't see them
Meat & city population are growing hand in hand (future 2x much food and waste)
Great cost, not valued (much trown away in the West, 1 billion hungry in Africa)
Unsustainable
Agriculture & cities were invented at the same time
Slavoj Sizek
Etichical/social capitalism (freedom & safity = good about liberalism)
Starbucks: you are buying more than coffee, you forfill ethical duty: fair price for bean producers & investing in Starbuck's World program etc.
Not for catastrophic political ethical economy (communism), but current system not sustainable, suggesting soft approach: soft apocalyptic vison
Wouter Mensink (link is not working
