Food and Urbanism: Connecting Urban Design and Food Space

摘要

When I started theorising about food and city design in the early 1990s, I argued that how food is grown, transported, bought, cooked, eaten, cleaned up and disposed of has significant effects on creating a sustainable, resilient and convivial future for urban space. I suggested that urban designers needed to recognise and reflect this in their practice. One of my work colleagues came up to me after a lecture I'd given on 'gastronomic strategies for Australian cities', where I made specific suggestions about how we might focus on food-centred design, and said 'It is a joke, isn't it?' With the benefit of hindsight I can see his point. No-one practising strategic planning and design nor almost any planning and urban design theory I found at the time (with Christopher Alexander et al, Bernard Rudofsky and William H Whyte perhaps being honourable exceptions), seemed to be making design connections between the food system and city form. Where it was acknowledged that food markets and cafes give local colour and vibrancy, food was to be added in once the important place design aspects, like parking, had been done. Planning for food production, retailing and consumption was mostly about accommodating bigger and bigger supermarkets, moving wholesale food markets to more 'efficient' fringe locations, treating retail food markets as leftover forms in irredeemable decline, situating urban agriculture as a romanticised hippie lifestyle adjunct, and so on. Food was not understood to have any profound relationship to place-making in cities, whether in central areas or burgeoning suburban and post-urban regions.