If you are not a soulless formalist, but an architect capable of surprise and surprise, this book (an excerpt from it can be read here) should appear on your table - like a cup of good coffee. Starting the day thinking about food is the right thing to do. And with Carolyn Steele it is also useful: this lady is easily transported from the ancient cities of Mesopotamia to the fair in provincial England, where 200 varieties of apples are still grown, and, discussing the taste and aroma of the best of them, she makes a fascinating march of 400 pages to the revolutionary manifesto on the reorganization of the world. At a good pace, cheerful and convincing. Toning reading!
Bruno Taut said: "The architect thinks, the housewife directs." But Hungry City is not a book of travels, recipes for inspiration or culinary exoticism. The author is an architect and talks about how food defines our lives, how this relationship shapes cities and dwellings, what happens if designers do not take the food chain into account. The chapters are devoted to different aspects and scales of mutual influence: from kitchen design, urban planning, under the pressure of supermarket monopoly, waste problems - to the prospects for sustainable development.
The Hungry City is one that is at least partially unable to feed itself, and this is not Steele's invention. Winnie Maas and partners from the well-known Dutch bureau MVRDV in the early 2000s came up with the "Pig City" - with skyscrapers for animals, believing that high-rise agriculture will solve both the problem of supplying the townspeople with meat and the land issue. This is not a joke, but a serious research project. Exactly the same as the decisions of the leadership of Barcelona and the Government of Catalonia to develop municipal markets (more than forty in the city) and support local farmers.
Carolyn Steele is convinced that "food as a way of analyzing lifestyle" allows you to link urbanization, hunger, geopolitics, depletion of fossil resources, global warming into the general scheme. Based on this module, you need to look for interdisciplinary solutions. Isn't it important for a planner, an architect to know about this? Know and understand the degree of personal participation in solving common problems? Or at least one - shortening the path from the producer to the consumer of products.
Steele's confidence in the "food module" is justified: Marx and all utopians spoke about the erasure of distinctions between town and country. Plato distributed the labor of citizens into equal parts - in the city and in the field. In 1935, in the "Radiant City", collective "radiant farms" were envisaged, located between the strips of urban development. As you know, another concept by Corbusier has become popular, however, the idea is still recorded in the history of the project. But Wright, since he was thinking about horizontal Yusonia, wrote in The Vanishing City: "Of all the driving forces working to free the citizen, the most important is the gradual awakening of the primitive instincts of the farmer."
Ideal city designs are always speculative. Ecological Dongtan near Shanghai, the project of which is led by the Arup bureau, is no exception. Everything has been thought out, except independence from food corporations … So, unlike “ideal projects”, the “food approach” is based on the fact that food is a real biological need. It is very old, it arose even before the appearance of sociology and marketing research, and even cereals in the human diet. Steele believes that "we never realized the true potential of food because it is too great to notice." It is important to realize that Steele bothers the reader with examples of pastures in place of forests around ancient villages, recalls food riots and their aftermath, shows how a shopping center is killing public spaces,and why the cottage community was mummified to the point of loss of pulse. Least of all in Steele's book of fiction, all theses lead to clear conclusions. If food affects our life and space, then how? Through control systems. What kind? Please find out about this for yourself in the "Hungry City".
That very revolutionary reorganization of the world must begin in our heads. After all, "food is a special form of dialogue." There are a lot of topics here! We can afford to talk in the kitchen about identity, family values and feminism. We can travel to Vienna to see how great waste disposal can be if the incinerator is drawn by Hundertwasser. Perhaps we should convince the customer to abandon plans to build another shopping center, telling how differently they approach this issue in the center of London and Paris? That the invasion of large chains into the neighborhood store sector is killing small businesses? Yes, we will be able to draw and decorate all his ideas, but, nevertheless … And also, after a mass meeting in the open air, we can go to a restaurant, rejoicing that the joint work and common meals bequeathed by the utopians really bring them closer!
With the kind permission of Strelka Press, we publish an excerpt from the first chapter of Carolyn Steele's book "The Hungry City" (Moscow: Strelka Press, 2014) about the gap, unique in history, between the production of food and its consumption by modern citizens.
