Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives
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Pies in the Sky?
The capacity of cities to grow at least some of their own food is beyond question. As the examples of London, St Petersburg and Havana demonstrate, even cities built on the assumption that their food will be coming from elsewhere can be adapted to become at least partially self-sufficient if the need is great enough. Since half of us already live in such cities, is there anything we can learn from them?
In Cuba, the accident of politics and geography combined to create a sort of urban-agrarian laboratory with many of the attributes – isolation, state ownership of land, strong community bonds – typical of utopia. Although the circumstances that brought it about could scarcely be called utopian, Cuba’s agricultural revolution has been enough to persuade the UK-based architects André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn that something similar could be achieved in the West. Viljoen and Bohn propose that underused urban spaces such as brownfield sites, car parks and grassy verges are reclaimed in order to grow food in cities. The new farmland would be designed to link existing green spaces together to create what they call ‘Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes’ (CPULs), green corridors woven into the urban fabric, connecting the city to ‘vegetation, air, the horizon’.59 Viljoen and Bohn argue that, with the right government support, cities as open-textured as those in Britain could not only produce a significant proportion of their own fruit and vegetables with CPULs, but through them could create valuable new recreational space for local communities.
The Vertical Farm Project, led by Dickson Despommier at Columbia University, takes the idea of urban agriculture one step further, putting it right at the heart of the city.60 The project’s aim, as its name implies, is to explore ways of farming vertically: to develop specially designed buildings that can be inserted directly into existing cities in order to grow their food. Vertical Farms would effectively be high-rise ‘food factories’ such as those proposed for Dongtan, although on a much bigger scale: tall enough and high-tech enough to feed the entire urban population. Using data developed by NASA, Despommier and his team reckon that 30 square metres of intensively farmed land would be required per person using current technologies, although with true utopian optimism, they anticipate improving on those figures with the use of yet-to-be invented ones. On the basis of current data, Despommier believes that
one vertical farm with an architectural footprint of one square city block and rising up to 30 stories (approximately 3 million square feet) could provide enough nutrition (2,000 calories/day/person) to comfortably accommodate the needs of 10,000 people employing technologies currently available.61
Quite what London would look like with the necessary 1,000 vertical farms 100 metres square and 30 storeys high can only be imagined.62 Nevertheless, Despommier makes a powerful case for the principle of vertical farming: zero food miles, on-site waste recycling, urban job opportunities, and an end to farming’s oldest foe, the weather. For him, vertical farming is a way of freeing the countryside to return to something of its former state, restoring what he calls its ‘ecosystem services and functions’:
Vertical farms, many stories high, will be situated in the heart of the world’s urban centers. If successfully implemented, they offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply (year-round crop production), and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for horizontal farming.63
The Dutch architects MVRDV also believe high-rise farming is the answer, although in their case they propose building entire cities devoted to it. Their 2001 project Pig City took a hard look at one of the Netherlands’ oldest industries, pig farming, which remains one of the most intensive farming systems in the world.64 They worked out that if Dutch pork were produced organically at its current rate (16.5 million tonnes a year), it would take 75 per cent of the nation’s land mass to achieve it. That, they argued, left only two options. Either we all become ‘instant vegetarians’, or we find better ways of raising pigs. Their resulting proposal – both playful and serious in the best utopian tradition – was to build a series of ‘pig towers’ 76 storeys high, each with floor plates 87 metres square to house the pigs in a high degree of comfort, in ‘apartments’ with plenty of bedding, access to large open-air balconies, and apple trees to rootle under. The towers would be powered by bio-gas digesters run on pig manure, and connected to a central abattoir to which the pigs would be moved by lift. Until that last fateful journey, the pigs would live much as many humans do now: freeing the countryside for other things. Pig City has gone down well in the Netherlands, and there is some official interest in taking the idea forward.
The Neo-Geographical Age
Whether or not vertical farming can be made to work remains to be seen. But for the foreseeable future, urban agriculture – or agricultural urbanity – can only ever be part of the solution to feeding humanity. City and country need one another, and their relationship is what we should really be addressing. That means thinking about cities differently; not just those we have already built, but those we are yet to build in order to house the three billion or so extra people expected to be living in them by 2050.
While projects like Dongtan are clearly a start, even the city’s design team recognises the limitations of building eco-cities without being able to address their relationship with their regional and global hinterlands. It seems we have come full circle. We are entering a new geographical age; one in which our choices about where and how we live are becoming as critical for us as they were for our distant ancestors. Luckily, we have one advantage over them: hindsight. So what have 10,000 years of urban civilisation taught us? One could write endless books on the subject, but in the end they would all boil down to one thing: respect the land. For thousands of years, we have been building cities and letting the countryside take up the slack. What if we were to reverse the process? What if we were to return to the ancient custom of augury – in modern guise – as a way of choosing sites for our cities? The primary purpose of augury, after all, was to ensure that cities were built in favourable and sustainable locations through careful observation of the natural terrain.
Porkers enjoying the high life in MVRDV’s Pig City.
For the Scottish biologist and geographer Patrick Geddes, that was precisely the right approach. Inventor of the word ‘conurbation’ (the professional term for large, urbanised blobs), Geddes was a keen student of the French geographer Élisée Reclus, whose concept of a ‘natural region’ inspired the Scot to create what now goes under the rather uninspiring title of ‘regional planning’. The dull name is misleading, however, because for Geddes, the natural landscape was anything but boring. It was a vibrant, living thing that held the key to all human habitation. In 1905, he drew a diagram describing a universal ‘valley section’, stretching from mountain and forest to grassland and shore. Man’s response to such natural terrain, he argued, has always formed the basis of human culture. Cities, such as they are, should take their cue from this ‘active, experienced environment … the motor force of human development; the almost sensual reciprocity between men and women and their surroundings’.65 Geddes believed that modern technology (the ‘neotechnic era’) would release people from having to live in large conurbations, allowing them to live closer to nature, with all their functional and cultural needs near at hand. As for the ‘ink-stains and grease-spots’ of existing conurbations, they should be blended with nature: ‘We must bring the country to them … make the field gain on the street, not merely the street gain on the field.’66
Geddes, it will be recognised, was a utopian with the best of them. But there is something in what he says. Technology has released us from some of our geographical bonds – has at least opened up new possibilities for the way we live. The merging of city and country is far from a new idea; on the contrary, one could say it is endemic to civilisation. It is also one of the most enduring themes in utopian thought. So is there anything we can learn about how to go about it? As it happens, two utopians, Howard and
Wright, provide us with two key paradigms, the compact and the spread. Howard gave us the post-industrial city-state, Wright suburbia; and when you consider the differences between the two men, it is not hard to see why. Howard was English; Wright American. Howard belonged to the age of steam; Wright to that of the motor car. Howard was no architect; Wright was. Howard was modest; Wright was not. And so on. No surprise, then, that Wright’s utopia assumes limitless land and transport and is all designed by him, whereas Howard’s assumes limited land and transport and is not.
Utopian visions tend to mirror their creators and contexts – so what does that tell us? All we have to begin with when we design cities are paradigms; notions of what might work and what might not. Until we actually try something, we can never know for sure how successful it will be, and even then, we might have to wait years before we find out. Building cities will always be a messy business. It is up to us to use our knowledge, experience and instincts, and respond to the situation as best we can. On that basis, it must be said that Howard’s approach appears to have more practical applications for us today than does Wright’s. In modern parlance, his garden city presents us with a low-carbon-footprint model; Broadacre City with a high one. Yet opinions are divided among architects and planners over whether we should be building ‘cluster cities’ or suburbia. In his 1997 book Cities for a Small Planet, the architect Richard Rogers advocated building as densely as possible, utilising existing ‘brownfield’ sites rather than allowing cities to spread on to green belts.67 His arguments became enshrined in government policy through his work for the Urban Task Force in the late 1990s.68 Yet 10 years on, housing in Britain is still being built at an average density of just 40 dwellings per hectare, and suburbia remains easily our most popular residential model.69
Whether we build densely or not, there is no doubt that we need to find ways of living more sustainably. The British government recently announced plans for the construction of 10 new ‘eco-towns’ with the intention that they be ‘zero-carbon’, although quite how that is to be achieved if the towns are plugged into the same food supply networks as the rest of us is anyone’s guess. The Thames Gateway has also been named Britain’s first ‘eco-region’, with a masterplan by the architect Terry Farrell, although so far the parkland with which new urban districts are to be merged is to be of the recreational rather than the productive sort. Despite the fact that much of the land being developed is highly fertile – including market gardens that once provided London with much of its fruit and vegetables – the issue of food production has yet to appear on our eco-regional radar.
Unless we address the political and socio-economic structures that govern cities, the question of what shape we build them, ecologically speaking, is of marginal importance. It is how cities function as organic entities that really matters. Building cluster towns in Kent is all very well, but if their inhabitants are still eating biscuits made with Bornean palm oil, their ecological credentials will always be compromised. Although there is much that can be done design-wise to make cities more eco-friendly (and Dongtan is doing most of them), there is still a swathe of issues about the way we live that designers by themselves cannot address. That is where utopia still has much to teach us. Howard’s eco-cities were surrounded by productive countryside; not recreational parkland. They addressed the entire urban eco-cycle, not just the energy needs of individual buildings. So why, if the Garden City was such a brilliant idea, did Howard’s vision fail? The glib answer is that it was utopian. But there are other reasons. Just like Owen before him, Howard anticipated government support that never came. The really radical part of his plan called for political will; and that, as we know, is the hardest thing of all to obtain.
Small Answers
Contemplating the global meltdown that our post-industrial lifestyles appear to presage can be depressing. But it need not be. Once we confront what we’re doing head-on, we can avert catastrophe and make our lives, and those of the people connected to us through food, a whole lot better in the process. It is not too late.
If we simply all considered food more, that would be a start. If we connected the peas on our plate to someone, somewhere, farming; the chicken in our sandwich to a living animal; related the taste, texture and colour of the food we eat to the weather and seasons. Food is the envoy of the countryside – a living part of the landscape where it was grown. Apart from making clear ecological sense, eating locally and seasonally is more enjoyable. In his book, Slow Food, Carlo Petrini had a great deal of trouble persuading his communist colleagues that the enjoyment of food was not in itself a sign of bourgeois decadence.70 It isn’t. Some of the best food in the world is what the Italians call la cucina povera: literally, ‘the food of the poor’, delicious because it is local, seasonal and simple. Most of us living in cities can’t dream of eating as well as the average Italian peasant; but we can still make the link, as all peasants must, between what we eat and the land where it is grown. Once we have done that, we become what Petrini calls an ‘ecological gastronome’: someone who recognises the importance of food, and uses his or her knowledge in order to eat ethically.
In 1999, the Slow Food philosophy was extended to the concept of ‘Cittaslow’ (Slow Cities), towns where the way of life respects the value of locality, craftsmanship and history, and where people are, in the words of the Cittaslow manifesto, ‘still able to recognise the slow course of the Seasons and their genuine products respecting tastes, health and spontaneous customs …’71 It goes on:
‘Living Slow’ involves hastening slowly – ‘festina lente’ as the Romans used to say. The Slow lifestyle respects tradition and quality, and seeks to use the best aspects of the modern world to enhance, preserve and enjoy the old ways of doing things, but not to the exclusion of progress and not for the sake of avoiding change.72
Towns wanting to join the Slow City movement must meet 60 different criteria (including having no more than 50,000 residents), and must commit to embedding the Slow Food philosophy in the running of the town. So far, 100 towns in 10 countries have qualified, including Ludlow, the first Slow City in the UK.
While the ideals of Cittaslow are overtly utopian (as the movement itself acknowledges), one does not have to live in a cute village in order to improve one’s life through food. Whatever size and shape of city we live in, we can use food as a means of inhabiting it better. We can choose what food to buy, how we buy it and from whom; decide whether we cook or are cooked for; where we eat and when; with whom we eat and what we waste. All these things affect the places we live, from their physical appearance down to their social marrow. When we make time for food, we start to notice simple things: the sound in the room, the quality of light, the colour of walls, the noise in the street. If we want a rich and varied urban existence, we must embrace food in its totality; not just in order to live more ethically, but to engage with its manners and sociability.
Once you begin to recognise that we live in a sitosphere, city and country emerge as one continuous territory in which terroir, traditionally linked to the soil, is seen to transcend the urban–rural boundary. Locality, seasonality, identity, variety, tradition, knowledge, trust: all are as important for cities as they are for the countryside. London pubs, New York delis, Roman trattorias, Parisian cafés: all are examples of urban terroir. As is the food and drink they serve: steak and kidney pie; bagels and salt beef; pasta and pizza; croissants and café au lait. Whether you like them or not (and a characteristic of local foods is that not everybody does), they are what give urban life its flavour.
So if we were to design a city through food, what might it be like? A ‘sitopic’ city would have strong links with its local hinterland through a lattice-like food network, with active markets, local shops, and a strong sense of food identity. Its houses would be built with large, comfortable kitchens, there would be neighbourhood allotments, possibly a local abattoir. The local school would teach kids about food, and children would learn to grow and cook it from an early age.
Above all, the city would celebrate food; use it to bring people together. The architecture could be as modern as you like, but it would not all be designed or built at once. The city plan would use food networks to ‘seed the city’, putting social and physical mechanisms in place that would evolve naturally over time. The city would thus, as cities were in the past, be partly shaped by food. Greater government protection from food monopolies would ensure the city enjoyed a high degree of food sovereignty, but it would also have access to medium-scale industrial food production, ethically managed and transparently monitored. There would be no formal limit to the size of the city, but its emphasis on food would ensure that, whatever its scale, it would be conceived from the start as an integral part of the local organic cycle. A city designed through food, in its ideal form, is clearly utopia. But we don’t have to aim at perfection. By just seeing through food, we can go a long way. Sitopia is utopia grounded in reality.