Interview with Carolyn Steel
Carolyn Steel, architect and author of ‘Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives’, talks to uncube about the extraordinary disconnect in our relationship with food and the food systems that supply – and shape – our cities.
You often refer to Ambrosio Lorenzetti’s fourteenth-century painting, ‘The Allegory of Good and Bad Government’, which shows the passage between a city and its surrounding countryside, to illustrate this fundamental relationship: as you’ve pointed out cities and agriculture developed together, so the flow of food and the need to transport it into cities, has always been around.
Yes. And this idea of flow is very apposite as it is precisely where my thinking is taking me now: the circulation of food as a constant flow of nutrition and energy – encapsulated at a basic level in its passage through one’s own body.
We have to eat every day, but the flow of food is a bit like a river that can be diverted one way or another, through choice – do I shop at a chain supermarkets or look at the other options? We have to make these choices much more consciously.
The invention of cities created what you call the ‘the urban paradox’.
As soon as you’ve got a city, you’ve got a problem, because feeding a city is not an easy thing to do. And the bigger it gets, the harder it becomes to feed.
You’ve always emphasised the importance of the distribution rather then just the production of food.
The control of the flow of food, not the production, is power: it’s all about logistics. Originally, when the distribution of food was as big a problem as the production of it, you had to have small compact cities with everybody able to physically access the food.
»We’ve created political and economic structures that allow the fantasy of cheap food to exist.«
Carolyn Steel is a leading thinker on food and cities. As an architect, she has been a member of the architecture practice Kilburn Nightingale since 1989. Her book Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, (Vintage, 2008) describes how food is key to the ‘urban paradox’ at the core of civilization. She is a visiting lecturer at Cambridge and Wageningen Universities and has taught for a number of years at Cambridge and London Metropolitan Universities and the London School of Economics.
One of the main problems you identify is the way the flow of food has become invisible.
Yes. I think that’s the most profound issue that we’ve got: people don’t see food, except at the packet end, and therefore don’t value it. We’ve created political and economic structures to allow the fantasy of cheap food to exist.
Food hasn’t got less important, but we behave as if the problem of feeding ourselves has been solved, which clearly it hasn’t. I mean, yes, there is plenty of food flowing through our cities now, but we are basically trashing the planet in order to make this happen. As Raj Patel points out in his book ‘The Value of Nothing: how to reshape market society and redefine democracy’, a $2 hamburger actually costs $200 – if you factor in all the costs of climate change, soil degradation, pollution, Type 2 diabetes: you name it.
You describe food as a design tool to be used.
In the past, food literally shaped cities. It was the dominant issue in planning: you didn’t found a city until you had sussed out whether you could feed it. It’s no accident that most great cities are at the mouths of great rivers. But once the railways came along this profound relationship changed. We entered what I’ve called the ‘a-geographical age’: which roughly corresponds to the last 200 years. Later, with the car – firstly in the USA – cities became so spaced out that the flow of food was divorced from the city altogether – and the big out-of-town supermarket was invented, which is anti-urban: you leave the city to get food.
But we are now moving into a sort of ‘neo-geographical’ age, when the importance of food is once more becoming relevant to where we live and how we live. It’s no accident that food planning is a new and rapidly emerging discipline. The realisation is that food is something that a planner might just want to think about! p
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