Motivation Feeding the world in the 20 first centery

Situation:

Despite covering just 2% of the earth’s surface, cities consume 75% of the earth’s resources. Yet, at the same time, cities continue to grow; only the city of Aarhus increases by approx 4000 people every year. These numbers indicate the importance of rethinking our current food production, questioning their typologies, self-sufficiency, localization, byproducts, and biodiversity.

Denmark has set a climate target for CO2 so that we can contribute to fulfilling the Paris Agreement. By 2030, we must have reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by 70% compared to 1990. A crucial way to achieve the climate goal is, therefore, a gradual transition to a future Danish agriculture that focuses on the production of organic, plant-based food for humans rather than feed for animals. It will help the climate and nature if agriculture produces more food for humans and less feed for animals. Eighty percent of the Danish agricultural area is used to grow crops for animal feed, which needs to drop significantly.

Potential:

Food is much more than just a basic necessity of life. How we grow, prepare and eat our food is strongly interwoven with our culture, society, and how we see ourselves. Issues related to food demand solutions on many levels: technology, administration, economy, design, legislation, culture, and society. However, new approaches only tend to work if they are accepted emotionally and rationally. Architecture can help undermine our preconceived notions and imaginaries by supporting and facilitating alternatives.

The challenge of feeding a growing population with healthier alternatives in an environmentally sustainable manner is significant. Consider the facts on the last page (side dish A). The Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that the worldwide food supply will need to increase by 70% by 2050.3 However, it is not only healthy food needs that must be met but also the need for a biodiverse way of producing it. Therefore we need to implement alternative cultivation systems that work across multiple species and with different digestion systems and nutrition outcomes.

So how do we collectively digest the Anthropocene? First, by approaching the question of togetherness as radically plural, transscalar, and multi-dimensional. But this is not something new: this is how existence is composed. Secondly, we must look at this from different time perspectives, scales, and life forms.

Instead of engaging in a food system that is a linear progression from production to consumption, we need to see the food system as a dynamic, fluid, and complex network of care with more than human actors. A system where we should encourage a widening of the collective palette — both culinary and cultural — where we embrace food produced in unrecognizable ways. This system that emphasizes our interconnectedness can be understood as metabolic.

Proposal:

Collective digest: Acts of convivial metabolism explores architecture’s potential to perform metabolic processes, generate resources – food and energy – and self-decompose through the design of a future food facility within an urban context. The project should be approached as an exploration rather than a problem-solving exercise. It attempts to speculate on new localized and energy-efficient ways to produce plant-based foods, welcoming the materialities of their byproducts, embracing metabolic coexistence, convivial care, and urban densification – an architecture of a collective digest.

Metabolism:

The term “metabolism” is defined as the consumption and transformation of energies and chemicals in any given body. From the vast agro-industrial complexes that feed our cities to the photosynthetic microorganisms that sustain the invisible chemical balance of the atmosphere, any system defined by the process of material or energetic transformation can be understood in metabolic terms. It is a fact that metabolism is fundamentally a process that unfolds as an interspecies alliance.

In this project, I will refer to the notion of metabolism to understand architecture as a body, an organism with its own digestion processes, literally and metaphorically. In this way, it can be possible to see new approaches to how food production, distribution, consumption, and decomposition, could be (re)organized and choreographed. The architecture in this project is designed to generate and recirculate resources through different symbiotic relations, like a living unity with materials and symbiotic processes.

Convivial coexistence:

With metabolism as an approach, the project focuses on the (re)organization of digestive processes and the design of their experiential and convivial qualities. In other words, an inclusive architecture that facilitates the creation of entanglements across multiple matters. In the metabolism drawing, these actors coexist by feeding each other in an entangled reciprocal subsistence system that doesn’t starve its surroundings.

Entangled map: Metabolism.

Collective digestion:

To understand how to (re)organize out of digestive processes, I investigated different projects that relate to metabolism and regenerative systems. I asked myself what new rituals, systems, materials, and spaces could emerge from the networks of food production, digestion, distribution, and decay. The process is seen in the case study booklet on the following page.

Through my case studies, I understood how regenerative systems work, what supports them in the form of machinery and device systems, how they can fail, and what their need is in terms of labor or maintenance. In addition, I understood better that metabolism is often “messy”. That processes are not always abstract as ‘arrows’ but are sometimes dirty and demanding. They rely on external support and are also worth being experienced.

With this understanding and how cultivation systems can be combined, I started my design development by creating a diagram of a collective digestive infrastructure. It illustrates the entanglement of production and consumption and how energy, water, and waste products can be connected.