This is the fourth part of a series of essays that explore the impact of food systems through four key territories: oceans, forests, countryside, and city, reflecting on the research behind Schmidt Hammer Lassen’s 6-part publication The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security first published during the UIA World Congress of Architecture in 2023.
City
We might see the city in two ways. The first is the city as an actor in the biosphere—an entity in itself—an organism of production and consumption that represents the urban condition. The other is the city as a collection of people, their relationships and social contracts, formed through physical infrastructures, economics and shared identities. These frameworks are not divorced from one another. Churchill’s quip, ‘We shape our buildings; thereafter they shape us’, acknowledges that we are enmeshed1 with the environments in which we reside, and that our environments themselves are malleable, continuously retrofitted and recomposed.
As entities, urban areas appear to perform poorly in ecological terms. They occupy one fifth of a percent of the earth’s land mass, consume nearly eighty percent of its food, and create nearly all of what we consider to be waste. Through agriculture, construction, mining, fishing and other forms of resource extraction, they conduct an oversized backstage of territories on which they depend. However, the notion of urban vs rural sets up a dialectic: an unhelpful dichotomy anchored in the precept of the post-industrial city where zoning policies draw lines around what can and can’t be done in designated areas. In reality, the structure of urban environments is anything but homogenous, and since the countryside itself has become industrialised, arguments for segregation of urban and rural programs become tenuous at best. Whether sufficiency can or cannot be achieved within defined geographical borders is immaterial to the aim of reinvesting urban spaces with the experience and output of productive ecologies.
If we take the city, not as an object, but as a collective of people that might benefit from a closer relationship to the source of sustenance, the reasons for bringing food production closer to people's daily lives become innumerable. As an extension, our food environment—our agency over the possibilities available to us—are mediated by urban infrastructures. This consideration prompts us to rethink the role of architects and urbanists, as it challenges conventional practices. Given the profession's structure, and how projects evolve from the brief to delivery, greater interaction between designers and the communities they serve is essential for food systems to play a role. If city design inevitably influences social transformation, we reshape cities through social value propositions. The intricate relationship between communities and food—involving access to healthy ingredients, attitudes, cultural identities, and shared responsibilities—calls for a nuanced approach. It requires collaboration between designers, consultants, and local authorities working alongside communities, to deliver projects.
In reality, the structure of urban environments is anything but homogenous, and since the countryside itself has become industrialised, arguments for segregation of urban and rural programs become tenuous at best.
There appears to be a collective reticence to explore food production in urban areas. In a modern perspective, civilisation’s success is marked by freedom from subsistence. Yet there appears to be a fundamental desire to reconnect with both nature and productive labour in cities. As zoning policies revert to encourage artisans and light industry to return to civic centres, our cities are being reinvested with food growing spaces, and the pleasure of production is back on the menu alongside the diversity that arises from an expression of desires between grower and consumer.
Within the city of Sao Paulo, thirty one organic market gardens covering around 230 000m2 weave their way into the urban fabric, occupying leftover infrastructural spaces of the poorest neighbourhoods. Cidades Sem Fome (Cities Without Hunger) pay at least triple the minimum wage and food security to over five hundred workers. The poorest members have begun to eat well, learn to read and write, and take holidays. At Phood Farm in Eindhoven, the long-term unemployed and ex-prisoners produce food in the city centre as a social rehabilitation therapy, where people are able to see the practical result of their work and gain empathy for nature and their colleagues. In New York, Brooklyn Grange conducts an educational curriculum for the host of cultures that constitute their neighbourhoods that reestablishes the ingredients, practices and communities of diasporic migrants. Rather than needing to disengage with civic life to have a meaningful relationship with food and nature, these spaces redefine civic life.
A motivation of desire stems from an apprehension of potential alternatives to the way food intersects without lives. It involves dissatisfaction with a food system designed more for wealth generation than nurturing life, coupled with the education and agency that enables us to imagine different ways of living. Given that over half the world's population now resides in urban areas, we might see cities as the testing ground for that change.
Farewell to the Holocene
If we consider the precarity of our current food systems, it becomes clear that a multitude of approaches are required to establish food resilience and security. What is less apparent are the opportunities to enhance our daily lives. The Hacktivist Guide to Food Security is conceived as a tool to stimulate new conversations and insights of how food systems might be recomposed to transform cities, landscapes and oceans for mutual benefit.
Enlai Hooi is the head of innovation at Schmidt Hammer Lassen. Since 2021, he has led the firm’s research into the impact of architecture and urban systems on the ecology.
1 Enmeshment: a condition defined in psychology in which two or more entities are so deeply intertwined as to compromise individual autonomy and identity.
