Jasmin Liddell - Architecture, Community & Food

The Intrinsic Links Between Architecture, Community and Food

Title and Contents

page one

Abstract

page two

Introduction

page three

A Vision of the Future in Leicester

page four

Present Day Leicester

page five

History of Leicester

page six

Food poverty, and the Value of Food

page seven

The Kitchen

page nine

Agriculture and Urbanism

page eleven

The Effects of Globalisation on ‘Agribusiness’

page twelve

Non-Spaces

page thirteen

Romanticising the countryside

page fifteen

Fast vs. Slow

page seventeen

Sharing Food and Space

page twenty

Bibliography

page twenty-one

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Abstract

A reclamation of space, this my design thesis aims to put people back in touch with sources of two precious forms of nourishment through architecture: food and community.

The following work is the research carried out for my design thesis, and an evaluation of the ways in which society has become separated from food as a natural resource, taking into consideration the ways in which architecture and planning have facilitated this separation.

Using the context of Leicester, my design offers the alternative to modern 'non-spaces', like supermarkets. This thesis will act as an investigation into the feasibility and possibilities of a community ran city farm with associated market gardens and kitchen. The work investigates Leicester historically and socially in particular, as the proposed development is situated in the region. This is to provide specific and insightful critique of the proposal against a historical context. Following exhaustive research, I will make the argument for the reintroduction of a community-based City Farm, as well as associated market gardens and kitchen.

The architectural platform that I propose aims to tackle any issues that could arise with a project that aspires to so drastically alter our relationship with food. I aim to not only reestablish the connection of time and effort with food each day, but to also break down the notion of the individual shopper moving through a non-space alone, rebuilding the community needed to tend a farm and garden.

I will make an argument for the reestablishment of a laborious relationship with food – revisiting an era wherein more time and effort was afforded to the production of food supplies. I will show how moving toward a convenience society has quantifiably damaged communities’ health and wellbeing not just in the western world but also globally.

The virtues and values of proper cooking — an essential, defining human activity, which sits at the heart of our cultures, shapes family life and is in itself hugely enjoyable.

Food carries us from event to event, and so rarely the event itself. Birthdays, festivals, Christmas, Eid; all centre around food — they couldn’t and wouldn’t take place without it. We annually celebrate and get together to share and celebrate life and food as one — but we have become lost in the festivities and forgotten about food every day. To get food, and share it is a bygone coupling that we, as humans in all cultures, hold dear.

Food is one of the key ways in which cultures self-identify. Ceremonies and socialisation worldwide almost always involves local food or drink, unique to the area or prepared in a unique way — Japanese tea ceremonies, the Spanish fiesta, and an English Sunday roast. Ceremony, architecture and food are inexorably intertwined. What will future societies make of our increasing appetite for the ready meal, TV dinners or takeaway food?

Will they have a critique at all or is this the start of a new era in human dining, going through a teething period historically?

The dining table has become an artefact of the past — even the kitchen is missing from so many dwellings in the 21st century — bedsits have a fridge, a toaster and a microwave. In a modern kitchen, the dining table’s purpose has been usurped more by a need to store laptops, unopened letters and handbags, than as a once sovereign domestic entity. One could go so far as to say that even cooking itself has become an artefact of the past. We watch endless cookery programmes, but prefer, finally, to spend lots of money on supermarket ready-meals while idly turning the pages of spotlessly clean cookery books until the microwave pings.

Through the exploration of varying cultures’ attitudes and relationship with foods, I’ve found it necessary to design a space that allows people of various backgrounds to share their culinary knowledge. Communal kitchens, workshops, parties, will allow the multicultural populous of Leicester to share mealtimes, as well as their knowledge of food with each other.

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Introduction If architecture itself is perceived to be the epitome of human dwelling in its fullest meaning of the word, while social context is provided by political and cultural platforms, then cities could be understood as the principal demonstration of architecture. However, cities are not merely concrete, glass and steel; they are inhabited by humans — flesh, bones and blood — all of which still pertain to the age-old human need to eat. So how do cities eat? Architecture supports life, and hence inhabitation, but at present does it still support food, and eating?

We may think of architecture as being finite, but of course buildings change, they evolve with us, and this applies more than ever to kitchens both commercially and domestically. Architecture becomes a placeholder for periods of time in society, reflecting social demographic, political situations, historical function and more. When a city loses its population it loses its reason to exist. Cities are left with architectural remnants; and where buildings once had a purpose they cannot continue to fulfil it without human occupation or residence, buildings and the spaces around them need human life or they start to die themselves. Serious issues of justice, racism, economic and health disparity, as well as inequitable power relations are consequences of the shrinking cities phenomenon. In the wake of the last economic downfall, there are hundreds of empty buildings, urban prairies and wasted open space in the centre of cities asking to be re-appropriated into something that isn’t another student housing development or a Tesco Express. ‘Urban prairie’ describes vacant urban land, where parts of a city have returned to nature.

In a society where we are spending less and less of our money and time upon food, yet more and more of the world’s natural resources are being destroyed in order to produce food, all this apparently has no effect — more than 1 billion people are obese, and the same amount are starving. How is it possible that in the UK, food poverty affects over two million people and a further three million people are estimated to be at risk of becoming malnourished? The projected statistic for UK obesity in 2020, is that one-third of all of adults, one-fifth of all boys, and one-third of all girls will be obese. 1 The modern food industry is an alien world of cooler trucks and distribution centres, where farming and deforestation come hand in hand, and the 21st child would hardly recognise its food in the field when asked, for lack of contact with the real food production world.

Adults and children need to be educated about food, farming, and available ecosystems within cities such as Leicester.

Food has become more confusing than ever before. The science says we mustn’t eat too much of the wrong things, but no one’s quite sure about the right things. Diets say you must eat like a caveman, or a bird, or with a blindfold on. There are so many differing opinions and diets, that it can leave us feeling a little stumped. Plants, however, are the one thing that everyone can agree you can never eat too much of. It is clear that vegetables, as well as children, are our future. Plants have spent enough time on the sides of our plates they deserve a place in the spotlight. Focus on the power of plants, and bask in their diverse glory. It’s time to start thinking of meat and simple ‘sugary’ carbohydrates as a side. Our bodies thrive when we eat lots of plants. Not just leafy greens, but vegetables, herbs, legumes, nuts, fruits, seeds and even coffee beans.

We are, in the 21st century, re-finding the kitchen as the centre of the home where the fruits of our labour are enjoyed and celebrated unlike the Victorians who feared food followed by rations, feminism, and the rise of processed food and the ready meal… food has become fashionable! Therefore, I suggest resolution in my design research project this year; an investigation into small scale urban farming that doesn’t just tackle food production in urban areas, but also brings about an understanding of food and diet in a community through the architecture of a communal kitchen, alongside aiming to tackle food poverty. City Kitchen tries to answer a simple question: can you find a unifying language that cuts across age, income and culture, help people to find a new way of living, to see space differently and to think about natural resources differently? The answer is yes: the language is food. Food is but one common ground between disparate communities — a cross disciplinary, ubiquitous medium of connection, communication and production; and we must globally appreciate and recognise that, as Carolyn Steel says: 'while the atmosphere is what we breathe, the sitosphere (from sitos, the ancient Greek word for food) is what we live in. 2

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Joanna Blythman: Bad Food Britain, How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite Steel, C., Hungry City, p.291 3 of 22

A Vision of the Future in Leicester Post-completion of City Kitchen It’s a Saturday and there are thirty families or more coming to make their lunch — it is an open oven day — anyone can buy a lump of pizza dough, some tomatoes from the greenhouse freshly blitzed into sauce, and cheese from a local Leicestershire dairy, and bring their own toppings along to make lunch. Getting your lunch in this fashion obviously takes much longer than ordering from the pizza delivery chain up the road — but speed is not the point. Perhaps they’ve come to meet their former prenatal class here, all of them now with six-month-old babies, and they’re all spread out on three big blankets; or they’ve just arranged to meet a friend and spend an afternoon off work; or maybe they came alone, new to the neighbourhood, hoping to put some names to the faces seen on the streets.

There are successful precedents set for this City Kitchen project, yet there is no set procedure to follow. This isn’t necessarily a pristine and perfect environment, done by the book — it is an organic, living system, subject to variations in the weather and the local inhabitants. It’s a different world to the twenty-four-hour, clinical city we are used to — it’s a hub of information, a gritty, wonderfully earthy space. From sowing the seedling potatoes in the ground to taking the crisped roast potatoes out of the oven three months later and putting the peelings into the composter, here tasks are carried out wholly and thoroughly, a closed loop system.

Visitors, who aren’t really visitors at all but frequenters and family, are here for education, therapy, community, or merely just passing the time.

There is a strong, natural desire to eat together; growing and sharing food and stories alike. A public oven that gives such a strong push for strangers to share overlapping stories is a very good thing, in a city where so many people know so little about one another’s stories, past or present. A communal oven like the one found in City Kitchen can be used as an everyday commodity as well as to attract festivals and community events.

City Kitchen was an immediate success — a small amount of new buildings, the derelict Great Central Railway station and several associated disused factory buildings were transformed into a lively complex of communal ovens and kitchens, gardens, workshops and studios, a food education and research centre, a café and bar, market stalls, street vendors, and thousands of customers and tourists. This is urban renewal success in Leicester, in the form of communal kitchen, small allotments and farm and education centre. Buildings that would otherwise have been empty, are now inhabited by food, and hence life. These spaces have gained a new authenticity that has transcended the ubiquity and repetitiveness inherent of chain shops and restaurants so common in British cities. One could go so far as to say that City Kitchen Leicester has brought genuine artisanal quality food back to Leicester, and what Carolyn Steel says of Brough Market in London, equally applies to the City Kitchen in Leicester: ‘It involves human contact with food — [avoiding all the middle men and machinery] — helps preserve what remains of quality local food in Britain.’ 3

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Carolyn Steel, Hungry City 4 of 22

Present day Leicester The city of Leicester lies on the River Soar, close to the National Forest; in the East Midlands. The population of Leicester is 330,000, and is the second fastest growing city in the country. Situated roughly in the centre of England, and an hour’s train commute to London, the city is ideally placed at the intersection of the North-South Midland main railway line, and the East-West Cross Country railway lines, as well as being at the midpoint of the primary North-South motorway (M1). This proximity to London, and excellent transport links to the rest of the country mean that Leicester is often the first choice for distribution centres and main offices of many large retail and commercial companies.

A massive 80% of the world’s population already live in a city, 4 and everyday more people are leaving behind the countryside for a metropolitan life. Cities have undergone a change over the last century, a change in density, architecture and people. While we cannot singularly put an end to the problems that come with this ( i.e. the urbanisation of humanity, and destruction of natural resources for food production which result in a combined problem of feeding a 21st century mega-city) we are able to educate those living there and help them to a better understanding of food. We can use architecture to provide alternative ecologies within the modern cityscape available to its inhabitants, who currently rely so heavily upon the Multinational Corporation supermarket chains who have almost world domination over our food consumption and production.

The site of City Kitchen is near the River Soar, just west of the Leicester inner city ring road. It is here worth noting that the few existing allotments of the city are close to, or outside of, the outer ring road. In and around the city centre there is some green space, but it is mostly abandoned sites or manicured parks. City Kitchen aims to bridge this currently purposeless area from the Highcross commercial area, and inject life and local commerce into the triangle of disused wasteland. City Kitchen reimagines this space, paying respects to the past, and to the height of Leicester's industrial era, utilising the location as a hub for social interaction.

A culturally diverse place, Leicester presents a strong example of a modern city struggling with food production and consumption, a fact perhaps unknown to the inhabitants, but certainly recognised by the farming communities and environmental experts of the UK 5, as well as local governing bodies who have instigated a ‘food plan’. 6 I believe Leicester holds a strong case for a community run urban farm, capable of educating the local inhabitants, of all ages through communal kitchens; research into modern small scale food production, e.g: hydroponics; seasonal food production and food trade in on site markets; a seed bank; and more.

There are a lot pre-conceived impressions of Leicester that I have come across in casual discussions of the city. The images conjured up in just saying the city’s name are very interesting. Leicester is rich and culturally diverse, but in the centre there is not much evidence of this — it’s a quite generic small town, kitted out with the usual chains and franchises, although there obvious signs industrial heritage of red brick factories. Leicester suffers (but also has positives) socially and politically from its proximity to London — an hour’s train takes you into the centre of London - this is so convenient that it seems like there is a constant max exodus out of Leicester for the big smoke, pertaining to an image that Leicester seems forgotten about as an entity in itself. The ring road is a blot on the city — you are either working or living inside or outside of it, this is a shame, as it seems to be the council’s limit or boundary for development — we as architects and instigators for positive development need to push this. New Walk is a significant artery into the centre from the South, and Jubilee Square is the historic centre of the city — systems of power seem to sit around it, for example the BBC — the forum of the Roman town of Ratae was here. There are still large areas of industrial buildings in the city, and as a pedestrian you can move very quickly from a lively, bustling street to a back alley surrounded by empty warehouses. It is such a waste that this situation happens in the city centre. Leicester appears to have a flawed approach to parking, whereby it is overrun but half-empty, surface parking in prime locations.

Not many locals use public transport to get into the centre, and I assume this is because it simpler drive to more accessible outer city areas for shops, avoiding the one-way roads, and busy ring road. Hence, the way that people move in, out and around the city is one of Leicester’s biggest problems in terms of locations for, or allowing for architectural development and renewal.

The notion of this thesis project developed by aiming to reframe the way in which people think about urban evolution and green space.

As in Smart Cities + Eco Warriors, CJ Lim ‘explores how the holistic reintegration of agriculture in the built environment can cultivate new spatial practices and social cohesion in addition to food for our tables’, 7 I hope to find a way to do this in Leicester as well.

According to CJ Lim; ‘The Smartcity is a vision of an urban future from an architectural perspective as opposed to a planning, environmental engineering or socio-economic one.’ 8

Carolyn Steel, TED Talk: How Food Shapes our Cities Sustainable Food Cities, Key Issues 6 Leicester City Council, Leicester's Food Plan 7 CJ Lim, Smart Cities + EcoWarriors 8 Ibid. 7, p.7 4 5

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History of Leicester A riparian city, Leicester traded upon its river crossing close to the confluence of the rivers Trent and the Soar, and has continued to flourish ever since the trade route initiated by the establishment of the Roman Fosse Way, which passed through Leicester from Exeter to Lincoln. The Fosse Way crossed the River Soar, where the Romans would have encountered the existing native settlement at the site of today’s Leicester. It is likely that this settlement had control of a ford crossing there, and that the Romans took over. Roman Leicester was known as Ratae. Once the forum and basilica were built, public baths soon followed in 145 AD, they were fed by an aqueduct, and were located where the Jewry Wall still stands today. Remnants of the wall and baths remain in Leicester today, adjacent to the proposed site of the City Kitchen, and in close proximity to the location of the Roman Forum.

The construction of the Grand Union Canal in the 1790s linked Leicester to London and Birmingham by water, and by 1832, the railway had arrived in Leicester, with a direct link to London's St. Pancras Station established in the 1860s. These developments encouraged and accompanied a process of industrialisation which culminated during the reign of Queen Victoria.

The city experienced a particular boom during the industrial revolution and the introduction of the railway to this boom brought even more people and work to the city. Leicester's diversified economic base and lack of dependence on primary industries meant that it was much better placed than many other cities to weather the tariff wars of the 1920s and Great Depression of the 1930s.

However, with the rise of the car and the use of cheap labour abroad, Leicester’s industry more than halved; subsequently after WWII and the later completion of the inner ring road, what was left of Leicester’s industry had been pushed to the outer reaches of the city and forgotten about, a shadow of its former Victorian red-brick glory, replaced by the likes of Tesco and Sainsbury’s. The years after World War II, particularly from the 1960s onwards, brought many social and economic challenges.

Urban expansion and central rapprochement saw mass house building continue across Leicester for some 30 years after 1945.

There was a steady decline in Leicester's traditional manufacturing industries and, in the city centre, working factories and light industrial premises have now been almost entirely replaced. With the loss of much of the city's industry during the 1970s and '80s, some of the old industrial jobs were replaced by new jobs in the service sector, particularly in retail. Like traditional industry jobs, industrial spaces were abandoned or altered, some claimed by modern capitalism and rebuilt as retail spaces.

Leicester’s bygone industrial significance leaves the city rich in spaces that are ripe for enterprise. Using the City Kitchen and associated farm as the centre point from which to create links to the city, particularly any green spaces which could act as satellite allotment spaces and communal outdoor nodes throughout the city in the future, and through public buildings and transport connections where heavy pedestrian footfall occurs, like the market, train stations, university grounds and The Highcross shopping centre.

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Food Poverty, and the Value of Food ‘New UN data suggests that an estimated 8.4 million people, the equivalent of entire population of London, reported having insufficient food in the UK in 2014, the 6th largest economy in the world. An estimated 5.6% of people aged 15 or over in the UK reported struggling to get enough food to eat and a further 4.5% reported that, at least once, they went a full day without anything to eat.

Based on these preliminary estimates, the UK ranks in the bottom half of European countries.’ 9 The percentage of children living in poverty is exceptionally high in the Leicester city area — the highest in the East Midlands and on a par with Birmingham and London; the latter probably only being due to its sheer size, population and density of people. 10 Implied here is the high probability of associated poverty, i.e. poverty extending beyond the children into the families’ households. This is basis for a need for solutions, and is in part responsible for the farming element of City Kitchen.

Malnutrition and food security are not problems solely associated with the developing world and are increasingly becoming associated with people living in the UK and USA — particularly those in low income families. Child obesity rates, malnutrition and food poverty are on the rise in the West — with detrimental effects to mental health, and education prospects. In a survey conducted by UNICEF of childhood wellbeing assessing twenty-one country in the developed world — the UK came bottom of the list. 11 To give some context to the situation the UK’s children have to contend with: the average amount spent on primary school meal ingredients in 2003 was 35p — this was half the amount spent on meals for inmates of HM Prisons, and a quarter of the amount spent on army dog’s meals, which was £1.40! 12 Allotments have the potential to act as an empowering solution to the breadline, but while people are uninformed about how to grow, how to eat, what to grow, and lack the skills to teach others; there must be a system for education on food, and a re-integration model for those who have lost the connection. Allotments also have the potential to raise problems in relation to upkeep and time to offer. This further demonstrates the need to renew our connection to food as a labour of love and not a convenience or inconvenience that fits in our family’s schedule. An investigation into community run city farms and associated market garden and kitchens should tackle these issues through the use of space and social context.

The irony we face today is the fact that feeding cities has become infinitely more complicated than it was in years gone by. We still have to eat and food still needs to get into cities, despite the fact that fewer and fewer of us grow, cook, or even shop for our own food anymore.

The modern food industry is being stretched to breaking point; the sheer scale of the global operation is becoming too big for even itself.

In summation, industrial supply chains sustain city dwellers’ gastronomic demands, yet we behave as if they were nothing to sing and dance about. In today’s consumer society, perhaps this view is to be expected, most manufactured items today are expendable and are designed with planned obsolescence. We throw away cars, mobile phones, food, computers, and more — even the environment.

‘Wastefulness epitomises our way of life [and this applies to architecture as well], not just in what we throw away, but in what we consume and how it is made. In those terms, we consume nothing more wastefully than we do food.’ 13 Almost seven million tonnes of food is thrown away each year (not including commercial waste), that is one-third of the total food British households buy. 14 Learning from other cultures is good, however not in the way society is pushing us: ‘Britain’s willingness to embrace world cuisine — albeit in bogus forms — is admirable, the huge success of non-British restaurants in the UK reflects the relative weakness of our indigenous cuisine, resulting in a mongrel mish-mash of misunderstood foreign cuisine, cooked by amateur chefs and served to naive and inexperienced diners a culinary Tower of Babel.’ 15 As Sue Palmer explains: ‘It is now widely accepted that developmental disorders [for example: Dyspraxia, Asperger’s, ADHD, autistic spectrum disorders] have a genetic — or, at least, neurological — component. Nature plays a major part. But, it is also widely agreed that the way children are brought up inevitably influences their development.’ 16 Indicating that while DNA is obviously of consequence, a child’s upbringing and external influences carry a significant weight. As a result of this, children in the UK are losing more and more understanding of basic foods, and understand less of what they are eating — this could be a direct result of living in cities where agriculture is never seen or experienced, and further still, due to their parents’ lack of knowledge and lessening desire to cook. The British Potato Council found that 60% of children they asked believed potatoes came from trees 17 — it would be interesting to know what percentage could make the connection between a potato and a bowl of chips.

Learning to cook, and knowing about food should be an essential part of a child’s upbringing, an activity learnt in the home by absorption from parents. So where have we gone wrong, if a child can’t recognise the humble potato, surely something in modern society has to give in order to educate our children, as an action against a generation of ignorant-eaters and microwave-cookers. ‘[Children learn by] watching food being prepared then eating it, slowly accumulating experience through observation and participation. As they get older, they learn to help guide the pasta through the teeth of the pasta machine. They help with podding peas, or peeling potatoes. They are sent to check if something is burning in the oven. They pick up ideas about what to do with a glut of seasonal fruit. They watch adults, usually mothers and grandmothers, turning out a family meal almost everyday. And they have the experience of sitting down around a table and enjoying communal food alongside adults who know more about food than

The Food Foundation, Too Poor to Eat: 8.4 Million Struggling to Afford to Eat in the UK BBC News, Mapping Child Poverty 11 Sue Palmer, Toxic Childhood 12 Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain, How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite 13 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.261 14 Ibid. 12 15 Ibid. 12 16 Ibid. 11, p.5 17 potatoes.ahdb.org.uk/knowledgehub/research-projects/39?keys=Consumer 9

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they do. In most societies, food appreciation and cooking is an effortless chain of knowledge, passed on in a domestic setting through the generations, informally and without any fuss.’ 18 It is people that cook who have the power — they control the food that enters and leaves the kitchen, and hence our bodies. They know what raw ingredients to get, how to choose the ingredients and in which season, get the flavour just right and what to do with the leftovers the next day. It is people who don’t cook, that are affecting our cities and environments: ‘People who don’t cook don’t use local food shops, invite their friends round for dinner, know where food comes from, realise what they’re putting into their bodies, understand the impact of their diet upon the planet or educate their children in any of the above.’ 19 It is true that there is no better way to learn about food than by cooking it, and I learnt (almost) everything I know about food from my mother. When it comes to my parents, one cooks, one definitely does not - definitely being the operative word when it comes to my father’s cooking capabilities and attitudes to food). My mother in turn learnt everything she knows about food from her mother. Just as Carolyn Steel so aptly explains, my grandmother, mother, and now I: ‘can tell you which cuts of [insert any animal] are tough or tender and why, which bits are cheap or expensive; which are good for roasting, frying or stewing. [They know] when vegetables are in season, what to do with giblets, how to tell whether fruit is ripe, whether meat is safe to eat.’ 20 This knowledge has been instilled into me as an essential part of my upbringing. However, when it comes to my brother, it is a different story. He falls into much the same category as my father – food is fuel. Like many people my mother’s age, her horror at the prospect of waste — food or any other — rubbed off on her from her parents in British post-war upbringing, and then on to me. I realise I am lucky in this sense, and perhaps that is why I have such strong negative attitudes towards a consumer lifestyle and planned obsolescence in all walks of life — from food, to gadgets to architecture.

Cooking and food knowledge these days seems to be a hidden art, and unless you go out of your way to learn about either, or are paid to work in the food industry, you are likely to be one of many unlucky folk who are losing — or never gaining — the related skills and knowledge. The sort of knowledge about knowing when vegetables are in season, is entirely hindered by supermarkets’ tendencies to avoid local, seasonal varieties of fruit and vegetables, to make way for imported ones thanks to the eternal global summer provided by mass food production and distribution. While cooking could be argued to be a vital, defining, human skill; history has been hesitant to acknowledge this, meaning that it was often overlooked. This is mostly due to the fact that is a messy activity; cooks are not only required to collect and produce food, but also to slaughter animals, and perhaps raise them as well. Furthermore, cooking inherently leads on to serving others. However, while all of this is true, it is a necessity — someone has to cook, cooking may be messy and brutal at times, but the outcome of the meal has a huge significance in terms of culture and society today. 21 Children should not just know how to cook, but also the far-reaching influences of food. Instead of learning about food safety and hygiene, food poisoning and germs; and if young children grew their food, and cooked their own lunches they, (and their parents and teachers) could overcome the fear of food. Through food they can learn about ethnic diversity, waste and environment, health and nutrition, religion, and more.

Joanna Blythman, Bad Food Britain, How A Nation Ruined Its Appetite, p.206 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.164 Ibid. 18 21 Ibid. 19 18 19 20

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The Kitchen The proceeding section explains how we are valuing the place of food in society less, but what affect does this have on the architecture associated with food: the kitchen, domestic or commercial.

The kitchen has throughout history been hidden at the back of the house, disguised in service quarters or relocated to basements.

Practically this could be because cooking can be messy and noisy, and many odours linger from kitchens long after cooking is finished.

However, Carolyn Steel argues that kitchens are removed from view in part due to the mess, noise and smells; another part due to the fact that the chefs of haute cuisine wished to hide the secrets of their culinary arts from the prying eyes of lesser cooks; but mostly a kitchen has been hidden from view because ‘if people could see how their food was being cooked, they would refuse to eat it.’ 22 There has of course, always been the notion that cooking was women’s work — a housewife’s job to put dinner on the table for her working husband — but in professional cooking it has largely been the opposite: chefs are male. It could be said then, that as the nonprofessional kitchen was the domain of the housewife, this has influenced architecture accordingly. The bricks and mortar of the humble home carry preconceived ideas of nurturing, hiding the kitchen and taboo. This is most apparent in Arabic households today, but can evidence is still obvious in the Victorian domestic architecture we still inhabit today — upstairs downstairs architecture, and hidden service quarters. Even in Ancient Greece and Rome, kitchens were separated from the rest of the house by an open courtyard — the furthest they could possibly be from public areas. 23 A few successive events in Victorian society, led to a shift in Britons’ attitudes towards food at the time. Mass migration to the cities had separated so many people from their traditional links with food, few of them knew how to cook, and fewer still cooked for themselves. It can be ascertained that there is a great irony of such a rich and ‘great’ nation of whom roughly only one quarter could actually afford to eat. Although this social issue wasn’t turning the minds of the upper class to fear food. Victorian society’s guilt was heightened by the publication of Darwin’s Origin of Species: ‘The possibility that man might be consuming the flesh of his own distant relatives’ 24 was all too much to bear, and gave rise to the most substantial point of argument the Vegetarian Society needed in order to form in 1847. All in all, philosophies discussing man’s place in the natural order, and compassion for other animals other than humans, brought about the question of eating meat itself. Thus fuelling once more the fear of food, implications of guilt, and inherent squeamishness: ‘Like a bunch of guilty murderers trying to stash the corpse, Victorians repressed their doubts and set about arranging the world so that its less savoury aspects disappeared from view. […] Food, which had always occupied a place in the human psyche somewhere between desire ad fear, now took a decided lurch toward the latter.’ 25 In order to satisfy this fear of food, and save from the embarrassment of cooking, Victorian houses were designed and built with an aim to please their inhabitants by having separate dining rooms, complicated networks of services quarters with a view to hide the inner workings of the home. The main outcome meant the suppression of the existence of the kitchen. Segregation and ‘upstairs-downstairs’ architecture meant that servants (and the suppressed kitchen) were expected to produce several courses of meals for the ever-popular Victorian dinner party - creating an almost comical paradox whereby it ‘was required to produce meals on an unprecedented scale, and to do so invisibly, inaudibly and odourlessly. In social and spatial terms, it represented a fundamental contradiction.’ 26 The 1830s gave rise to mass building of housing for skilled workers — the traditional Victorian two-up-two-downs, often built alongside and by the factories they worked in, as was the case in most of Leicester. Kitchens were still treated as repressed service spaces, even though most of family life took place in what was the scullery, and the parlour (dining room) was kept for best (and so never used), therefore cooking, eating, washing and more, all took place in the tiny scullery. Many of us still live in the flats and houses — two-up-twodowns — due to the fact that they were the dominant blueprint for prolific Victorian domestic architecture. These buildings help to preserve the Victorian mindset about the place of cookery in the home. While we are now a long way off what we know as Victorian life, and even though there have been huge advancements in technology and social context, cooking still seems to be a despised activity amongst Britons. Yes, WWI got rid of any remain servants amongst the lower and middle classes, mostly due to the decimated populations of the countries involved, but that just meant that housewives ended up having to do more, without the added benefit of time, resources and aid. 27 The maternal figures of each household now had to turn to what was a much neglected space, in terms of design, social role, materiality and function, in order to cook meals for their families. Cooking was an isolated task, both spatially and emotionally.

By the end of the 1920s, the Great Depression had taken its toll, meaning that wives and husbands became breadwinners both. Although the men did not have to work all day and put a meal on the table at the end of it. It was here that advertising and food production companies saw a niche in the market for the ubiquitous 20th century ‘convenience food’. Brands like Betty Crocker and Aunt Bessie’s pertained the American Domestic Goddess, and used the angst of the overworked housewife to target them with campaign slogans like: ‘good things baked in the kitchen will keep romance far longer than bright lipstick’. These food companies provided cooks with quick and easy fixes, fast foods, and shortcuts if they used their products.

Quite cleverly, in their convincing arguments that encouraged housewives to cheat, food production attacked cooking and the value of food in the household with a double blow — they managed to raise the status of cooking, slightly diminishing the fear of food, even though their customers weren’t technically cooking. Instead of actually making a cake, and gaining a wholesome sense of achievement, housewives were pretending they had. During the 1940s, American and British people were spending more on food than they had ever Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.169 Ibid. 22, p.171 24 Ibid. 22, p.176 25 Ibid. 22 26 Ibid. 22 27 George Wright and Henry Nelson, Tomorrow’s House 22 23

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done before. However, were are not to be fooled, cooking may have come out of the service quarter, but as far as most women were concerned it should be moved back and stay there. The increase in spending on food was not because people were investing in quality, but rather they were paying for the added value of convenience, and ‘before long, separate kitchens were making a comeback — this time not in order to hide the fact that people were cooking in them, [like good Victorian servants] but in order to hide the fact that they weren’t. 28 In actual fact, they were most likely to be heating up frozen turkey dinner, with a side of Aunt Bessie’s Yorkshire puddings, and Betty Crocker’s just-add-one-egg cake mix for dessert.

Eventually, feminism paved the way for renewed angst against the oppression of the housewife, leading to an uprising against the image of the domestic goddess portrayed by food companies. Giving your family a ready meal not only became the norm, but became a political statement in the eye of feminists. ‘Convenience foods became the national panacea, first for housewives, then for households at large: salvation form the curse of having to cook.’ 29 More than a century ago, Victorian architects strove to perfect the invisible, silent, odourless kitchen, and one could argue that ready meals have gone one better, ridding houses of cooking, and the need for a kitchen altogether. Ready meals mean that kitchens are in danger of becoming obsolete along with our relationship with food and our knowledge of cooking, all we need is a kettle (because heaven forbid the English cup of tea should become obselete), and a microwave — goodbye, kitchen and associated appliances, goodbye dining table. Architecture today is demonstrating the very situation I have just described: bedsits, apartments, and in particular student accommodation are all lacking in kitchens — some don’t even have a hob or oven — just a microwave and a kettle, maybe a toaster if they are lucky! Young people, and families on low incomes in particular, are suffering because these are the only kinds of accommodation they can afford in this current housing market. The poor are fast becoming victims of a national confused attitude toward cooking and food. ‘Despite food costing a fraction of what it did a century ago, [the urban poor’s] diets have barely improved: they have simply swapped one kind of malnutrition for another.’ 30 Moreover, even if Britain had a desire to cook, kitchens are barely adequate, or are nonexistent, probably crammed in at the rear of the building, seemingly an afterthought. Space is shrinking, and at the same time, appliances and machinery is growing: fridge, freezer, washing machine, microwave, juicer, blender, oven, toaster, hob and extractor, dishwasher, kettle, and more. There any space left for a dining table. Residential space is at an all-time premium, and kitchens are therefore under threat. Entertainment and TVs etcetera, are the main space users and seemingly the priority for modern house’s inhabitants – not a dining table and space to the cook food to be eaten at it.

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.192 Ibid. 28 30 Ibid. 28 28 29

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Agriculture and urbanism While the river is the most natural spatial organiser of most cities, its relevance is soon lost when overlaid by the automobile and rail dominated networks of post-industrialised cities. Efforts to integrate urban ecology into planning often leads to reference the historical conditions of vegetation and habitat as a basis for future interventions, perhaps instead we should look towards historical ecological functions rather than the literal conditions once present.

A large proportion of the earliest complex civilisations in the world, are based on riparian ecosystems — notably ancient Egypt, with its agricultural economy centred along the River Nile; and the first settlements of Mesopotamia, where the confluence of the Tigris and the Euphrates and their annual flooding allowed for the pioneering cities of Uruk, and Ur 6000 years ago. The rivers around these pioneer cities had floodplains subject to annual inundation by rivers carrying heavy sediment loads. Prehistoric works of flood defence and irrigation demanded firm community structures and required the development of engineering practice.

Where riverine cities did develop, they commanded ready means of communication. At various intervals of history, rivers have provided the easiest, and in many areas the only, means of entry and circulation for explorers, traders, conquerors, and settlers. They assumed considerable importance in Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire and the dismemberment of its roads; regardless of political structures, control of crossing points was expressed in strongholds and the rise of bridge towns, such as Leicester on the River Soar.

Before and during the ice age, human existence was based upon a hunter-gatherer, nomadic lifestyle, tracking and herding our food. The melting of the ice left produced a wealth of fertile lands and forests which enabled the beginning of human living in permanent settlements, in a non-hunter-gatherer dependency upon the land for food production. This dependency has been founded on the basis of the manipulation, modification, and eventual destruction of natural ecosystems (for example around 20 million hectares of the Amazon Rainforest is lost annually to deforestation to make way for grazing pastures and palm oil plantations etc.). This destruction has seen an almost exponential acceleration since the successions of inventions (steam power, railway, electricity and so on) paving the way for the industrial revolution in Victorian times, to the modern transport systems pertaining to huge import and exports on a global scale.

Remnants of this era gone by will be visible at City Kitchen in Leicester, such as the old railway arches, serving as a historical reminder and as proof of reclamation.

It is without a doubt that urbanism and agriculture are intrinsically linked, in particular after the pivotal discovery of grain. The first permanent human settlements in Mesopotamia were located in the Fertile Crescent — a large area of land which benefitted from the annual flooding of the Nile, Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Sumerian cities were distinct, advanced temple settlements, with a central ziggurat surrounded by farmlands reliant upon clever engineering systems involving huge levees which contained the river and subsequently irrigated the area, modifying the natural world to suit their needs, Sumerian civilisation annually transformed flooded desert into a blooming oasis awaiting harvest, and the dawn of urbanity’s dependence upon agriculture began.

Bringing food into pre-industrial cities was largely determined by the transportation and logistics of their arable peripheries. Trains reduced the contrasts of geography by allowing settlers to build a town anywhere, and of any size, without having to rely upon a dock or a wharf. Carolyn Steel explains that prior to the emancipation of cities by the railway, 'the simple laws of geometry meant that the larger a city grew, the smaller the relative size of its rural hinterland became, until the latter could no longer feed the former. ' 31 It is fitting that the start of mass food production was both initiated and enabled by the transportation of food via the railway, allowing food to be transported in bulk. 32 This was then succeeded by Ford’s invention of the assembly line and the mass production of cars, which paved the way for mass vehicular distribution of food worldwide, leading to the closure of many railway lines. In my design thesis, the process appears to come full circle with the site of a newly proposed urban farm and a re-think of food consumption and production in cities, at Leicester’s disused Great Central railway station in one of the areas most affected by the factory and western railway era, and the age of the early Victorian industrial boom.

While city farms go some way to redressing the disjunction of food production between the city and the countryside, rural farming practices should also be reappraised. There is, in reality, no such thing as cheap food. Supermarkets’ ‘buy-one-get-one-free’ offers are a low a monetary price for us to pay, when compared to the heavily priced death toll they bear on the natural world.

'For every calorie of food modern agribusiness produces, it is burning an estimated 10 in the form of fossil fuels. The cost of high yields from specifically chosen cultivars is borne by the soil, and monocultures have become so successful that worldwide surpluses have depressed the crop prices that farmers receive, threatening their livelihoods. ' 33 While 1.7 million hectares of Amazonian Rainforest are lost to farm land every year, 20 million hectares of existing arable farmland is lost to salinisation and soil erosion. Every year, Brazil’s government adds millions of hectares to the millions already in agricultural production, yet contradicting all of this — 850 million people face hunger every day. 34 The paradox we face here is that although humans inhabit cities, we still dwell upon the land — we are, after all, animals, and have animal needs. However, without farms, and farming, cities could not exist. Cities can no longer command and demand resources the way they do now, from elsewhere consuming at will, the future will have to demonstrate a change, from being autonomous isolated entities, to symbiotic, organic places, bound by appetites to the natural world.

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.70 Ibid. 31, p.90 CJ Lim, Smart City + Eco Warriors 34 Ibid. 31 31 32 33

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The Effects of Globalisation on ‘Agribusiness’ In the United Kingdom, we pay on average 75p per litre of fresh milk. Farmers then receive less than 20p of that, surmounting to an average loss of 3p to each farmer in Britain per litre. If you take into consideration that probably a mere 5p per litre would keep British dairy farmers in business — would you pay more? The global food market is what must take precedent in terms of criticism here, and the fact that we, as a nation, have gotten used to low priced food, delivered to us by companies of such enormity that they are seemingly above the law. 35 There is no such thing as global free trade in food: it is an ever more powerful oligopoly of companies. A staggering 85% of the global tea market is controlled by just 3 companies, and 5 control 90% of global trade in grain. 36 ‘The modern food industry has provided us with what our ancestors always craved: cheap and plentiful food. Now that we’ve got it, few of us worry about how it gets to us. But the companies who supply our food have an extraordinary hold over us; one that should have us very worried indeed. Farming may be ‘becoming irrelevant’, but we still need to eat. So when it turns out, for instance, that 81% of all American beef is in the hands of just for giant processing companies, who between them raise half of the cattle in the USA, where does which leave the American burger-eater?’ 37 For as long as agri-food-companies are more powerful than the governments choose to let them be, and run in a system controlled virtually by themselves, it suits the British government to let them to continue to bring us ridiculously cheap foodstuffs. According to Carolyn Steel; ‘the government pretends to control the food supply,’ whereas actually it is only ‘providing a legal veneer for the abusive market practices that keep food nice and cheap.’ 38 In summation, the global food system has led to commerce demanding corporately determined norms. Meaning that industrial scale concentration makes the food chain vulnerable, whether it be to contamination, disease or terrorism. 39 It also means that entire species could become extinct. In spite of this the corporate world continues to divert our attentions via capabilities to mimic the variety and individuality it is effectively suppressing. 40 The local shops sucked out of British high streets in what Steel calls the ‘superstore tsunami’ of the Nineties 41 are now being replaced with chains of mini-stores offering fake diversity.

‘The whole extraordinary process of commercial collectivisation has gone largely unregulated and unopposed, if not actively encouraged by local and central government, partly because it is so lucrative, but partly also because so many of its more worrying operations take place out of sight on other continents, or parts of them, that most people never see. […] It pillages finite resources, pollutes water supplies, eliminates wildlife, generates corrosive manure lagoons, exhausts and erodes the ground on which it grows.’ 42

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City Carolyn Steel, TED Talk, How Food Shapes Our Cities Ibid. 35, p.97 38 Ibid. 35 39 Hilary Spurling, Review: Hungry City by Carolyn Steel and The End of Food by Paul Roberts 40 Marc Augé, Non-Spaces 41 Ibid. 35 42 Ibid. 39 35 36 37

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Non-Spaces Anthropologist Marc Augé's book is a haunting analysis of modern life and in particular those homogenised 'non-places' where we spend so much of our time: airports, railway stations, superstores, motorways and international hotel chains. Unlike conventional 'anthropological places' (the symbolic site of an altar), these ‘spaces of circulation, consumption and communication’ exist beyond history, relations and the game of identity. Yet, as Augé shows, the anodyne and anonymous solitude of these non-places offers the transitory occupant the illusion of being part of some grand global scheme: a fugitive glimpse of a utopian city-world. The forces of globalisation and urbanisation are creating ever more of these Ballardian non-places, symptoms of a Muzak-filled supermodernity in which 'people are always, and never, at home '.

The global condition of space has been altered by our perception of it, chain stores and restaurants are not necessarily the true manifestation or effect of globalisation and corporate identity. The real issue is what they stop from coming into existence, or cease the existence of. Independent food stores in the UK are closing at an annual rate of two thousand. 43 No matter how much we enjoy a Caramel Seattle Frappucino with extra whipped cream, whilst sat in a comfy armchair listening to mundane background music, it is merely a successful blueprint that has been globally replicated Starbucks’ by clever marketing teams. Nonetheless, what does it matter of the authenticity of the coffee, and how many independent coffee shops have been put out of business purely because a Starbucks opened up in their neighbourhood; ‘it is a question of scale, when it is the only choice one has, it starts to mess with one’s identity.’ 44 The fact of the matter is that the very search for authenticity, for anti-corporatism, is being commodified as we speak; hipster London, and the guerrilla attacks on the gentrification of Brick Lane spring to mind. Independent coffee shops are omnipresent, stores that supply vintage goods are raising their prices. The same laws of style apply, the same rules of interaction. Newness is becoming absorbed, neutralised, romanticised and appropriated. Auge uses the concept of supermodernity to describe the logic of these late-capitalist phenomena—a logic of excessive information and excessive space. In this fascinating and lucid essay he seeks to establish and intellectual armature for an anthropology of supermodernity.

Augé describes such ubiquitous, superficial places, as non-places, for example an airport lounge or a supermarket aisle: ‘The word ‘non-place’ designates two complimentary but distinct realities: spaces formed in relation to certain ends (transport, transit, commerce, leisure), and the relations that individuals have with these spaces. […] As anthropological places create the organically social, so non-places create solitary contractility’, 45 Unlike Baudelairean modernity, where old and new are interwoven, supermodernity is self-contained: from the motorway or aircraft, local or exotic particularities are presented two-dimensionally as a sort of theme-park spectacle. Auge does not suggest that supermodernity is all-encompassing: place still exists outside non-place and tend to reconstitute themselves inside it. But he argues powerfully that we are in transit through non-place for more and more of our time, as if between immense parentheses, and concludes that this new form of solitude should become the subject of an anthropology of its own.

A step into City Kitchen five years after construction has ended: through the integrated pergolas running throughout City Kitchen (with fruit vines and climbing plants covering it), we are already far from the traditional clinical experience of the supermarket. The trolley is removed because the young mother walking through the space is aware that vegetable and fruits are seasonal, and it turns out to be more convenient and cost effective to buy a small amount of fruit and vegetable often than to visit the supermarket once a fortnight and fill the boot of the car. City Kitchen calls not just for a revolutionised approach to agriculture, community and food, but for a seismic shift in the way we approach eating.

According to Augé his second ‘figure of excess characteristic of supermodernity, concerns space’ 46, he says that despite the seeming abundance of space, and opening up of the world, we are shrinking the planet.

‘We are in an era characterised by changes of scale — […] rapid means of transport have brought any capital within a few hours’ of travel of any other. And in the privacy of our own homes, images of all sorts, relayed by satellite, […] can give us an instant, sometimes simultaneous vision of an event taking place on the other side of the planet.’

This is true of supermarkets; the sheer enormity of giant superstores, with hundreds of metres of endlessly restocked shelves, as far removed from a human scale as can be. They are so big, and require so much parking, and contextual space for the non-stop logistics going on around them, that they are situated on huge out of town sites where people can easily drive in, fill up, and return home, without having to go into inconvenience of the city. Cheap, cheerless and choked by branding, supermarkets are the very epitome of Augé’s nonspaces. They contradict the very nature of cities’ historic centres, market squares which are most often central, are specifically for the buying and selling of food.

Walker’s is the largest grocery brand in the UK, making 10 million bags of crisps per day (in the biggest crisp factory in the world!!), at the plant in Beaumont Leys, Leicester. Henry Walker — a butcher from Mansfield — the original owner of the company; moved to Leicester in the 1880s to take over an established crisp making business, and continuing his pie and sausage business. In 1971, Walker’s crisp business was bought by the USA firm Standard Brands, who subsequently sold it to Frito-Lay; a sub-division of the American snack-food giant PepsiCo (the largest globally distributed snack-food company in the world). Meanwhile, Henry Walker’s sausage and pie business was bought out by Samworth Brothers in 1986. Production outgrew the Cobden Street site, and pork pies are now manufactured at a meat processing factory and bakery also situated in Beaumont Leys. Sold under the original Walker's name, as well as under well-known UK retailers’ own brands — Tesco’s Finest, Sainsbury’s Taste the Difference, etc — over three million pies are made on a weekly basis. Food and meals in themselves are a diurnal ritual, of complex social character and phenomenology. While most of the food we consume has no propaganda or hidden agenda - hunger drives consumption, then greed. However, these meals still have influence over the urban landscape — purchasing branded or supermarket food, instead of from local sources, affects the infrastructure and fabric just as much as Carolyn Steel, Hungry City Ibid. 43, p.241 Marc Augé, Non-Places, p.19 46 Ibid. 45, p.31 43 44 45

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any town planning. If we choose to buy from an out of town superstore, then of course the roads, and architecture will change to fit our needs.

CJ Lim, makes an incredibly relevant point in his book Smart Cities and Eco-Warriors: ‘The Panacea to a deleterious food industry is to replace damaging large-scale monoculture with larger numbers of smaller mutually supporting diverse permacultures. Communities share much in common with agriculture, and one can show the way forwards for the other.’ 47

47

CJ Lim, Smart Cities + Eco-Warriors, p.38 14 of 22

Romanticising the Countryside: Utopian Ideals and Pastoral Pipe Dreams The countryside we imagine beyond our urban borders is a carefully sustained fantasy — pastoral tradition / romantic — but compare that to the sheer enormity and scale of the vast landscapes of corn and soya needed to supply the 21st century metropolis with food, all of which can be seen easily from space: Brazilian crop circles, gridded Californian landscapes, and industrial greenhouses in Spain. The UK is the oldest industrialised nation in the world, and we have been losing our connection with rural life for centuries — if, as previously mentioned, 80% of Britain lives in a city, the nearest many people get to the countryside is on television. Narrative history has relegated the country to a neutral green backdrop, good for battlefields, romantic picnics and not much else, and this is more often the impression that is portrayed on the television still today.

Since its very beginnings, non-hunter-gatherer civilisation has been founded upon the basis of production through the use, modification and eventual destruction of ecosystems. For this to unfold, the incremental separation of our society from the environment that it fundamentally relied upon. Our initial production of agriculture laid the foundation not only for the coming of cities and their eventual concentration of wealth, but for an underlying way of thinking about their relationship between society and environment. This western relationship expanded under colonialist efforts and pushed further with the onset of the western industrial era. Where humanity began as nature, it separated itself with the advent of agriculture, and gained dominance over it through revolutions of industry, capital and global economy.

In this sense humanity and civilisation as a whole have never really been producing at the most fundamental of levels. We have in fact always been consumers, our cities are the greatest of them all. The environment, and the resources we may extract from it, have become predominantly the means towards our individual economic ends. And with some success, as we have built massive cities the world over, yet at a cost that leads to local, regional and global ecological implications. While this might serve well for the arguments of conservation and preservation, to focus solely on our extraction of natural resources for material production would miss the reality that all civilisations have simultaneously romanticised the very same landscapes they employ. From the Japanese pagodas amidst gardens of miniature mountainscapes and manicured bonsais, to the Greek and Roman ruins carefully dispersed in the rolling green landscapes of the English gardens’ picturesque movement. As we have employed the environment to serve material needs, we have simultaneously created artificial natures in the cities which we live, for recreation, relaxation and social gathering.

This leads to a confusing situation as explained by Carolyn Steel where, while the greater environment suffers from our production, 'urban dwellers [see] nature through a one way telescope, moulding its image to fit their urban sensibilities '. As external environmental degradation has taken place, we have filled our cities with artificial ecosystems, which have no self-function or interconnectivity. While our parks are undoubtedly made up of the stuff of nature, it could be argued that in most cases they are not ecosystems in the true sense of the word, instead only images of the countryside which we might like to imagine, but not live or work in.

Our architectural and urban form has manifested this contrived image of nature. Romanticist works placing architecture as a gem in the ‘wild’ garden. Modernism draping green carpets around pure architectural forms jutting into the sky. Post-modernism pulling the romantic garden back into new-urbanist images. While these movements do use nature to different effect, in essence they all represent the same understanding of the environment; nature as idyllic scene, to supplement contemporary life. As said by James Kunstler, ‘the remedy for wounded and mutilated urbanism is not just flower beds [or] cartoons of the Sierra Nevada Mountains.’ 48 Although the Romantic Movement largely bypassed architecture whilst it characterised 18th and 19th century European literature, art and culture, the psycho-cultural aftereffects are still observable today. Towards the end of the 18th Century, a new wave of pastoralism took hold in France, with painters like Fragonard and Bouchard depicting the countryside as a sort of ‘idealised picnic-ground, populated by creamy-fleshed nymphs.’ 49 Romanticism sought to evoke and highlight the sublime aspects of nature which French and English society around 1800 began to see dismantled in the wake of industrialism. These works were characterised by almost a personification of nature phenomena. On the other hand, Rousseau disliked these pastoralist fantasies, he believed that while iron and corn civilised man, it ruined humanity. 50 His beliefs then instigated the French Romanticism movement.

Following from this worldview, the city becomes the de-facto habitat for the modern man — the park, garden or local valley becomes more aesthetic viscera — something to take ‘a trip to’. This viewpoint is far removed from what I would argue is the more profitable and sensible possibility — that the inner city park, disused and derelict land and any other dead or empty space, can be used meaningfully for the production of food and to save space for other uses. This perspective however, smacks of utopianism, reminiscent of early modernism and pre-Jacobian town planning. But it is surprising and noteworthy, that agriculture per-se was largely absent in the utopianism writings of the early 20th Century.

Although in direct antithesis to one another, the Garden City Movement and Romanticism were both similar in that they barely acknowledged agriculture in their proposals ideals. It could be argued that the Garden City, despite eschewing the natural environment for the artificial greenbelt, was an intellectual descendent of the Romantic writings of, in particular, John Ruskin, wherein ‘green’ was just that, a colour – more visual than ecological. Romantic utopianism failed to provide a proposal – where does is our food and shelter, so that we may keep the natural world pristine? The Garden City, then, also valued the ‘natural’ in a cultivated, hermetic sense, but failed to delineate and end to its sprawling, outward-moving growth.

Corbusier’s Radial City was a young child when it’s father, the Garden City, became moribund and lost popularity. The radial city now hinged upon the democratisation of the motor vehicle, that people could now travel great distances in next-to-no time. These ideas have evidently been damaging, particularly for the public perception of architecture in the UK, which we will not go into within the bounds of this work.

James Kunstler, ‘The Ghastly Tragedy Of The Suburbs’ Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.30 50 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, et. al., Discourse on tThe Sciences and Arts (First Discourse); and, Polemics 48 49

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A counter-utopian narrative is only now developing after a loss of popularity among architects, being as they were, more interested in the possibilities of computational design, parametricism and other form-finding means during the ‘80’s and ‘90’s.

Recently, architects and planners have begun to catch up to unique global instances of huge relevance. The most obvious and commonly cited example is post-oil-embargo Cuba’s response to an atrophied oil supply. This example is particularly prescient as it was centred mostly on Russia, North Korea and Cuba following the Cold War. Comparing the three countries highlights the importance and security afforded by an urban agricultural program in lean times.

Russia was a different case to Cuba, in that despite having vast supplies of crude oil, it too experienced decimation of its exports revenue.

Importation of staple crops was cut, and so too, Russian society had to adapt to a complete u-turn of existing agricultural practices. Still Almost a quarter of Russian cities’ inhabitants have dachas, mini versions of their counterparts; the 18 th century bourgeois summer mansions. According to Carolyn Steel ‘St Petersburg is now the peri-urban farming capital of Europe, with two and a half million inhabitants engaged in agricultural activities of some sort, on with private dachas or community farms known as sadovodstvos, consisting of between 50 and 600 individual plots sharing common facilities.’ 51 These two examples highlight the security provided by community-led agriculture, as opposed to the predominant model of monoculture, which feeds foreign communities en-masse by economy of scale and artificial pesticides and fertilisers. Meanwhile, North Korea also faced identical problems to those of Cuba and similar to those of Russia, a major difference being an availability of cheap crude oil and its fractions, an indispensable resource in industrial farming – it is no surprise then, that North Korea experienced at least a population loss of 5%.

Returning to the original argument, these examples were the first that evidenced the rewriting of ‘utopianism’ among architects, who had before been preoccupied by form, aesthetics, mass transportation and community, now also had to consider food security, logistics, global politics and scarcity in general. This trend was exacerbated following the 2008 financial crash wherein the issue of food security among the increasingly financial unequal societies of the western world was a major consideration.

Arriving at the present day, manifestoes and writings of architects reflect and build upon these newfound preoccupations. Even the title of Smart Cities-Ecowarriors (2010) by CJ Lim reflects a guerrilla-mindset, more militaristic than authoritative. In his book Lim writes that, ‘While city farms go some way to redressing the disjunction of food production between the city and the countryside, farming practices outside urban areas also need to be reappraised and it is worth looking at how these have changed. […] Sustainability must be accessible and applicable to the practice of everyday life.

Consumers respond poorly to browbeating activism and need fiscal incentives to use less, and to be given greater control over the energy they use. Lower-carbon products and services need to become desirable, which is where the aesthetic aspects of design need to be employed.’ 52 By the 2010’s one can see the development from aesthetic-/political utopianism to ecological-political utopian arguments. One can sense concern also for energy scarcity, sustainability and even farming methods (crop rotation) that would have been absent in normative architectural discourse. The consequences of our relationship towards the environment, of placing false images of ecology where we live, simultaneously causing degradation and loss of actual ecosystems everywhere, demands that we alter the underlying relationship. This means a change not only in our desire for a romanticised ‘natural’ aesthetic, but more importantly the basic relationship of our production in regard to actual nature. This change of understanding will most likely come about through experience, for the individual and for a community. An experience of an ecosystem functioning in and of itself, as well as for it potential production on our behalf. If we continue to work and live in environments that are separated from or are false images of the environment, we will continue to misunderstand our impact upon and responsibility to the end.

To do this the city and its architecture must change, acting no longer as separated artefacts from the ecosystem that they draw resources from. Whereas cities historically have limited and removed ecological functions, we may now find ways of reinstating these functions for the betterment of the local environment as well as city life. Our needs and ecological needs are in fact interdependent, one system supporting the other in multiple ways. CJ Lim manifests that, as architects, we should strive to demonstrate the beauty in the juxtaposition of architecture and urban context against a pastoral background: ‘A cabbage or wheat patch is not as conventionally beautiful as daffodils or tulips, but when scaled up, replicated a thousand fold, reconfigured into vertical surfaces or arrayed into a pattern — in short curated — they can achieve the elegance of multi-sensory art and expand the limited palette of urban textures. […] Buildings and roofscapes will transform in colour, volume and scent through the seasons.’ 53

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City CJ Lim, Smart Cities + Eco Warriors, p.19 53 CJ Lim, Smart Cities + Eco Warriors, p.32 51 52

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FAST vs. Slow The British are fast becoming a nation of people who seem to regard food in the same way that motorists regard petrol. Increasingly, Britons are convinced that they no longer have the time to cook, or rather, it is not a good use of their time; unless it is Christmas Day, when we stand on ceremony and dabble in the ancient art of cooking to create the full works, trimmings and all. Perhaps it is because a meal eaten sat down with others takes longer than one eaten on the hoof. More and more often we are choosing food that can be prepared and consumed as quickly as possible, therefore omitting the ritual and ceremony of the dining table, as well as the companionship and vital social connection that comes from eating together and sharing food. Furthermore, the ready-meals and just-addwater food stuff that are becoming increasingly popular in the UK, are ruining our cooking skills and tastes, as well as fuelling a food industry that is generally not very reliable interns of health and the environment, as Carolyn Steel so rightly puts: ‘when you give up cooking you abdicate responsibility for what you put in your mouth’. 54 So, why do we persist in eating fast food? While I agree that most of the fast food industry’s sales tactics — economies of scale, use of certain social demographics, aggressive marketing, and reliance on brand recognition — there is still a question as to the initial appeal of the products they sell in themselves. We can understand here that Marc Augé’s argument that non-spaces are prolific in their anonymity and ubiquity 55 applies directly to fast-food restaurants — the replication of mass consumption in small scale ‘restaurants’ throughout cities globally, implies a sense of belonging that comes with a primal instinct for safety in numbers and sharing food with people close to us. 56 Surprisingly, American fast food is borne out of one of the richest and culturally diverse food ethnicities in the world - Irish, Italian, German, and Eastern European immigrants; added to the already heady mix of the original Western settlers, Mexicans and Native American Indians. It is argued that this precise richness of culture led to an American crisis of (food) identity, instigating a desire to find a common denominator food which was accepted by all. 57 Thus founding a bland, national dish albeit with vast amounts of available fresh meat. Over the years, as people sought more flavour and larger portions, the ever-present enhancers were added — sugar, salt and fat — the perfect formula monopolised by the fast food industry that was needed to disguise and sell cheap food, quickly, and in large quantities.

In Britain, the industrial revolution was the last straw on the already weakened British gastronomy’s back, providing the population with an apparently endless supply of reliable imported but processed food.

Looking back to the original fast-food chain restaurant from almost a century ago - White Castle - we can begin to understand their appeal to the inhabitants of a smog-choked industrial city. White Castle’s founders aimed to combat a growing American scepticism towards meat — the meat packing industry was mainly at fault for this. With hopes of creating an image of purity, the gleaming restaurants of White Castle were virtually championing Le Corbusier’s perfect white, crisp and modern ideals. Using clever architecture and design to achieve a formula for brand recognition and trust, White Castle relied on selling the exact same cheap meat the Americans had initial fears of, even while initiating a radical change where the kitchens were visible to all the customers. However, it was Ray Kroc, founder of McDonalds, who could see the global potential of the new formula for fast-food combining cleanliness, simplicity, transparency and predictability. Kroc started out his empire in richer the quarters of American society, with a cosier version of the White Castle restaurant, but based on the same ideals with one exception: whereas before the target audience for fast food was the working class, now it was for everyone. This of course was infinitely better for Kroc and the rest of the industry simply due to the fact that they could afford more. Sue Palmer writes in Toxic Childhood; ‘the addiction [to junk food] has been building up for some time, especially since fast food outlets proliferated over the second half of the twentieth century and restaurants like McDonalds became associated with days out, treats and parties’. 58 ‘By extending the economies of scale of modern agribusiness through to the [dining] table, [the American food industry] achieved an astonishing feat: the intrusion of corporate branding into the very heart of food culture, the meal itself, [from as early as the 1950s]. For a mixed society desperate to ditch any vestige of individual food identity, its one-size-fits-all approach fitted the bill perfectly. But in order to succeed outside America, fast-food companies had to find markets where the food culture was already weak — where effectively, it was already industrialised. Britain, for example. British food culture unravelled earlier than most, for the simple reason that Britain industrialised earlier than any other nation.’ 59 For a post-war nation already deeply infatuated with America, fast-food from the USA was an immediate success in Britain, and of course McDonald’s restaurants opening up met with little resistance. In the rest Europe though, it was not so much of a hit, in particular in Italy, where the arrival of McDonalds in Rome’s motivated a group to serve homemade pasta to outside. Today that group has become the Slow Food Movement – ‘Terra Madre’ founded by Carlo Petrini. 60 For many, cooking on fires, using traditional cooking methods brings back memories growing up with a solid fuel range cooker: parents chopping wood, stoking the fire, setting bread to rise in the bottom oven, or putting a stew on in the morning to cook slowly all day. A slow cooker in my mind, is not a large, electric, warming device, waiting on a timer for the green light, with a few choice veg, a stock cube and some pre-sliced ‘casserole steak’ from the supermarket. A Rayburn is the ultimate slow cooker, and the most stable feature of my childhood reminisces — not only is it a great oven and hob; it's a fantastic bum warmer on a cold evening; brilliant for hanging your laundry above; and was connected to our boiler, fuelling our radiators and showers — our cat and dog miss it considerably, as do I. Fast forward to today, I am at university, skipping breakfast for a takeaway coffee; grumbling at the range of too-cold sandwiches on offer in the Sainsbury’s meal deal; sat down all day in studio, concerned for my posture; trying to get my five-a-day and wondering whether I should be taking Vitamin-D supplements because I get about as much contact with fresh air and daylight as a mole.

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.70 Marc Augé, Non-Spaces 56 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City 57 Harvey Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty 58 Sue Palmer, Toxic Childhood, p.24 59 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.237 60 Slow Food UK, www.slowfood.org.uk 54 55

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My favourite past time as a child, and even still, is to take some food to the beach on my doorstep, or to the nearby moors, gather up some driftwood, build a circle of stones for a fire pit, and set about primitively cooking a meal. There is something about eating food, cooked on an open fire, working to gather and make the meal, that is so much more rewarding and satisfying than just flicking a switch, and turning a knob on the oven at home, and infinitely more so than pressing a button on a microwave. This feeling is enhanced innumerably when you are eating vegetables grown in your own garden; or starting an autumn term at university with apples from your mum’s trees in your bag; or when the eggs for your breakfast are fetched fresh from your chicken coop. Now, of course, I realise I was extremely lucky to have been brought up with a vegetable plot, fruit trees, chickens and more, even more so now that I look back and realise perhaps how ungrateful I was to have had pangs of jealousy when other children had chocolate fingers in their lunchbox, while I had fingers of raw carrot. Hindsight.

When nostalgia and a vision for the future combine, you land in the present with a desire to create.

I read once in a cookery book: some things can cook fast, and some things can’t, and to deny time to the things that can’t is to cook without love. 61 If we can draw attention to the value of the meaningful, slowed down processes of planting, growing, nurturing, harvesting, cooking, and then finally eating, your own food — even growing herbs in a window box is a start — I think we can begin to help people understand the need for a change in the global food industry and in turn the architecture related to it, from supermarkets right down to the humble domestic kitchen. We bring so much more value to the food we eat by slowing the process down. In Italy there is a ‘slow food movement 62,' which now has hundreds of thousands of members worldwide, that began way back in the 80s with a protest against a new McDonalds franchise in Rome. The movement’s goal is to steer an alternative course other than the one provided by modern agribusiness and (corrupt 63) global food commerce; by backing the smaller producer, the human-scale farmer, the local markets, the one-of-a-kind cheese maker, and so on. In a sense, it’s a movement to return slow food to local neighbourhoods, towns, and cities; in addition to restaurants and commerce.

Eating highly processed foods harm both the consumer and planet — our food choices maintain the landscape, which is kept green and manicured thanks to food and farming; we should choose to support local farming, jobs in those communities, in the choices of what we buy and eat. Food is the envoy of the countryside — a living part of the landscape where it was grown. City Kitchen, through the integration of seed sowing, later harvesting and communal eating, would connect the food on our plate to someone, somewhere, farming; and so the taste, texture and colour of the food eaten is wholly connected to something, including the weather and seasons.

If we can draw attention to the value of the meaningful, slowed down processes involved in producing and eating food — I believe we can help people begin to understand the need for a change in the global food industry, and in turn the architecture related to it — from supermarkets right down to the humble domestic kitchen. The Slow Food movement’s goal is to steer an alternative course other than the one provided by modern agribusiness and (corrupt) global food commerce; by backing the smaller producer, the human-scale farmer, the local markets, the one-of-a-kind cheese maker, and so on.

While the human race consumes global resources at a rate faster than ever: 1.5 times higher than the planet’s capacity to sustainably replace them, the global population has reached 7.4 billion. World population is expected to reach 10 billion by the year 2056; only 40 years from now! 64 Slow, is a revolution: an alternative to our obsession with speed. We cannot, and shouldn’t suggest, turning our back on our cultural revolution; there is no point in putting the blame on something but providing no remedy. I like new technology and what it does for individuals and organisations throughout the world, but it is toxic for those growing up in it, unlike adults who have grown up and then had it introduced to their daily life: we cannot physically speed either up without incurring drastic effects — time and tide infamously wait for no man, but the inverse is true when it comes to the human body and the natural environment. This clash between technological culture and biological heritage means that progress has accelerated so much that our species simply can’t keep up; our culture has evolved faster than our biology.

Cittaslow 65 was founded in 1999 off the back of Slow Food, to resist the homogenisation and globalisation of towns and cities, with aims to improve quality of life in towns by slowing down overall pace, particularly by use of space and the flow of life and traffic through them.

While the ideals of Cittaslow (Slow Food cities) are indeed utopian, as the movement itself acknowledges; one does not have to live in a chocolate box cottage in a picturesque village in order to improve life through food. All these things affect the places we live — whatever shape, size of urban environment — from their physical appearance down to their social marrow: choose what food to buy, how, and from whom; cook or be cooked for; where to eat and when; with whom and what we waste.

When we make time and space for food, we start to notice simple things: the sound in the room, the quality of the light, the colour of the walls, the noise in the street. If we want a rich and varied urban existence, we must embrace food in its totality; this applies equally to the architecture we live, eat and cook in. 66 Cittaslow leads on to ‘Slow Architecture’ 67 where concepts and buildings are curated gradually and organically, as opposed to building quickly for short-term goals. To aid in curbing human consumption, architects are extremely influential in redefining architecture’s value in relation to human health and comfort. The 20th century offered everything machine-powered, cheap and fast; the 21st must reintroduce the values of the natural and slow. Taking a cue from the Slow Food movement, architects can promote the superior value of slow designs.

K. Plunkett-Hogge and J. Vincent, Leon Family and Friends Cookbook, 2012 Slow Food UK, www.slowfood.org.uk 63 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City 64 UN, ‘World Population Projected to Reach 9.7 Billion By 2050’ 65 Pier Georgio Oliveti, www.cittaslow.org 66 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City 67 Paul Petrunia, Archinect, uk.archinect.com/news/article/2852/slow-architecture?ukredirect 61 62

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To help bend the consumption curve to a sustainable level, architects and designers must lead a global effort to redefine architecture’s value proposition as it relates to human health and comfort. Where the 20th century offered machine-powered, cheap, and fast, the 21st must reintroduce the values of the natural, relatively more expensive—at least in terms of capital costs—and slow. Taking a cue from the Slow Food movement, which successfully created a widely recognised global consumer culture around the value of unprocessed and local foods, architects and designers must promote the superior value of ‘slow’ designs that turn the machines off and instead offer the comfort that comes from being in touch with the environment in ways that enhance the quality of individual experience and wellness.

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Sharing Food and Space Food, is a common denominator; food, the right to eat, and the right to have shelter is a language all humans can understand. Food transcends all cultures, languages, races, communities, and classes, and so it’s placed perfectly to be utilised as a method of bringing all of the above together. There is a need, in the culturally diverse setting of Leicester, for a space to house this magnificent activity, of growing, harvesting, cooking, eating, and sharing food. Sharing a meal, and dining together, is instinctive to human nature, and a richly complex social phenomenon. ‘It is the context in which, more than anywhere else, we define ourselves as social beings and recognise our deeper bond with land, sea and sky.’ 68 ‘Community centres in the modern metropolis are a rarity. Conceived in the early 20th century in America, community centres were established to provide facilities for gatherings, group activities, social support and public information, premised on the idea that local communities are the permanent homes of most of their residents. The mobility and peripatetic nature of modern society has led to dispersion and diversity, challenging the relevance of the traditional community centre […], there is no permanent forum for intercultural exchange celebrating the ethnic diversity of world cities.’ 69 Utilising the existing chimneys of the empty remaining factory buildings on the site of City Kitchen, I have proposed the installation of two communal ovens. Older generations will remember the traditions of outdoor brick ovens and the varying countries they hail from — England, Portugal, Trinidad, Italy, Morocco, France, almost anywhere — and in Quebec there is a small outdoor-oven revival. 70 In most parts of the world, the old communal bread ovens are falling into disrepair or are already gone. However, baking bread or wood-fired pizza is a newly discovered pleasure for enthusiasts in the western world, and restaurants are starting up all over the UK offering wood fired pizza and more; but it's still routine for people in some countries. Elsewhere in the world, families take their homemade dough to communal ovens or bakehouses, following the tradition of centuries. Currently the wood burning pizza oven style of cooking is a hands off, restaurant experience at premium price, and nearly impossible to create at home. The presence of communal ovens in the City Kitchen, not only gives back this experience and taste to the community but also allows people to congregate and bake together.

Sharing a community oven was common in Europe for centuries. It's still widespread in the Middle East and North Africa, but died out in most of Western Europe in the 20th century. You can share equally, maybe drawing straws for your turn in a village bakehouse, or pay a small fee to a professional baker to put your loaves into his oven, and you communities aren’t limited to bread. Greek bakehouses still cook Easter lamb dishes for villagers and ‘working-class Britons took their Sunday joint to the baker’s to be roasted until well into the 1900s.’ 71 Meat, pies, cakes, and other dishes for festivals and holy days used to be cooked in big bread ovens by families who normally cooked on the hearth, but could afford a few extra pennies for special meals.

Often, communal ovens were a focal point for the community, with a central location. 72 The bakehouse could be a place for women to socialise and exchange news. In places where a baker presided over the oven, it might be young people and children who got a chance to meet while handing in dough and picking up loaves. Pans of dough were marked with distinctive cuts or with metal ‘tallies’ to make sure you got your own bread after baking.

The worth of growing and sharing meals is a catalyst for social cohesion. 73 A public oven is also a catalyst, pushing strangers to share conversation in a modern city could act a solution to the unfriendly reputation of most large cities.

Similar to watering hole or barbeque, the ovens in City Kitchen should attract festivals and community events- it is human nature to want to share food and feast on special occasions and the communal spaces of City Kitchen enable and encourage the spaces to be overtaken, settled into (the antithesis of non-spaces).

The dining room has always been a meeting place, for friends and families to come together — rain or shine, but we’re in danger of losing this. Family sit down meals are fading fast in light of TV dinners and 24-hour busy schedules. Kitchens in 21st century homes are often just big enough to squeeze a cooker in next to the microwave, let alone a table to sit around. A village oven is like the family dinner table – a meeting place for gossip, debate, warmth, shelter, fundraising, celebration etc. The oven is a communal public space promoting not only social interaction, but also bringing back direct trade into the heart of the community, cutting out the middle man by growing, cooking and eating produce on site, educating children and adults alike.

Local schools can come by the city farm for their horticulture lessons, and then use the communal oven to take cookery classes and learn about economics. Some of these children might never have encountered a farm before, even at a small urban scale such as this alongside the oven of City Kitchen; and so the oven brings them into this area of Leicester, they are likely to revisit with their parents and invest more of their time and money into the area.

Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.246 CJ Lim, Smart Cities + Eco Warriors, p.155 70 Jutta Mason, A Wood-Fired Communal Oven In A Park: Why Bother?

71 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City, p.168 72 Carolyn Steel, Hungry City 73 CJ Lim, Smart Cities + Eco Warriors 68 69

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Augé, Marc, Non-Places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity (London: Verso, 1995) BBC NEWS, Mapping Child Poverty, 2016 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7642689.stm Bertoia, Monica L., Kenneth J. Mukamal, Leah E. Cahill, Tao Hou, David S. Ludwig, and Dariush Mozaffarian et al. ‘Changes in Intake of Fruits & Vegetables and Weight Change in United States Men & Women Followed for up to 24 Years: Analysis from Three Prospective Cohort Studies’, PLoS Med, 12 (2015) Blythman, Joanna, Bad Food Britain (London: Fourth Estate, 2006) ‘Food Patterns and Dietary Recommendations in Spain, France and Sweden’, Live Well For Life, 1st edn (WWF, 2012) http://www.livewellforlife.eu/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/LiveWell_A4-Food-Patterns-Report_web.pdf Georgio Oliveti, Pier, Orvieto (Italy: Cittaslow International, 2011) www.cittaslow.org Jackson, Marie, 'Can Paris Teach London A Lesson?’, BBC News, 2005 http://news.bbc.co.uk/go/pr/fr/-/1/hi/england/london/4244609.stm ‘Key Issues’, Sustainable Food Cities, 2016 http://sustainablefoodcities.org/keyissues Kunstler, James, ‘The Ghastly Tragedy Of The Suburbs’, Ted.com, 2016 https://www.ted.com/talks/james_howard_kunstler_dissects_suburbia?language=en Le Corbusier, ‘Towards A New Architecture’, trans. Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Press, 1972, 115 Leicester's Food Plan, (Leicester: Leicester City Council, 2014) https://www.leicester.gov.uk/media/178765/leicesters-food-plan-2014-16.pdf Levenstein, Harvey A, Paradox Of Plenty (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) Lim, C.J., Food City (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014) Lim, C. J., and Ed Liu, Smartcities Eco-warriors (Abingdon: Routledge, 2010) Liu, J., ‘Malnutrition at Age 3 Years & Externalizing Behavior Problems at Ages 8, 11, & 17 Years’, American Journal of Psychiatry, 161 (2004), 2005-2013 Mason, Jutta, ‘A Wood-Fired Communal Oven In A Park: Why Bother? - Project For Public Spaces’, Project for Public Spaces, 2016 http://www.pps.org/reference/awoodfiredcommunal/ Nelson, George, and Henry Wright, Tomorrow’s House (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1945) O'Callaghan, Tiffany, ‘Sugar Is Toxic And Should Be Regulated’, New Scientist, 211 (2011) Ogden J, et al., ‘Distraction, Restrained Eating and Disinhibition: An Experimental Study of Food Intake and the Impact of 'Eating on the Go’, Pubmed: NCBI, 2016 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26296575 Palmer, Sue, Toxic Childhood, 2nd edn, (London: Orion Books, 2015) Petrunia, Paul Slow Architecture, (California: Archinect, 2004) uk.archinect.com/news/article/2852/slow-architecture?ukredirect Plunkett-Hogge, Kay and John Vincent, Leon Family and Friends Cookbook (London: Conran Octopus Ltd, 2012) Pollan, Michael, Cooked, (New York: Penguin Books, 2013) Rossi, Aldo and Peter Eisenman, The Architecture Of The City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982) Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Roger D. Masters, Christopher Kelly, and Judith R. Bush, Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (First Discourse); and, Polemics (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1992) Rowe, Colin and Fred Koetter, Collage City (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978) Slow Food UK (London: Slow Food Movement, 2016) 21 of 22

www.slowfood.org.uk/about/about/what-we-do/ Spurling, Hilary, ‘Review: Hungry City By Carolyn Steel And The End Of Food By Paul Roberts’, The Guardian Online, 2008 https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jun/08/scienceandnature Steel, Carolyn, Hungry City (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008) Steel, Carolyn, ‘How Food Shapes Our Cities’, Ted.com, 2016 https://www.ted.com/talks/carolyn_steel_how_food_shapes_our_cities?language=en The Food Foundation, ‘Too Poor To Eat: 8.4 Million Struggling To Afford To Eat In The UK’, The Food Foundation, 2016 http://foodfoundation.org.uk/poor-eat-8-4-million-struggling-afford-eat-uk/ UN, ‘World Population Projected to Reach 9.7 Billion By 2050’, United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, New York: 2015 http://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/2015-report.html

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