Hungry City

"I chose this book for the same reason as City of Quartz. Hungry City shows equally brilliantly how architects are far more enmeshed in the world around them than they themselves would like to believe. It is a book which provides a very evocative description about how one thing, food, has shaped our cities, through things like markets, food miles and food production and so on. It’s an argument which, if you thought about before you read the book, you might think was a bit mad. But by the time you get to the end, you are persuaded that food is absolutely essential to the way that we understand our cities, and also by her argument that we should think about food when we are thinking about how cities should be made in the future. If you think of what Tesco’s has done to the heart of our towns, most poignantly in terms of our small country towns, for example, food has to be a consideration. Yes, because architects are part of the social and political world. I am not making the argument that if you are aware of the social and political circumstances, it is possible to have a revolution through architecture (which is the sort of modernist belief that you can change the world through architectural production). What I am arguing is that at least if you are aware of these forces, then you are able to respond to them; take a stance against them or for them. When you are designing your next housing scheme, for example, you know whether to put in the potential for communal gardens for growing vegetables. An awareness of the wider context allows one to be creative beyond just making beautiful things."

"Carolyn Steel carries on the theme of how we use land. She deals with the very current concern that cities today are not sustainable because the hinterlands from which they are fed are running out. The trail that food has to take is enormous and also not sustainable. What Carolyn Steel does is give a fascinating historical perspective. You realise that these problems are nothing new. For example during the Roman Empire there were huge food miles importing oysters from Whitby in England to the well-to-do in Rome. What I found particularly refreshing about her book is that although the concept isn’t new, the idea of looking at the problem historically is. Yes, definitely. First she gets us talking and thinking about these things. Food for her is something that can bind together what are otherwise rather disparate disciplines. For example she looks at architecture, geography, planning and the environmental movement. If we can use food as the subject on which to have these debates when we chat at the dinner table and in our daily lives then we can we can solve some much bigger problems that seem a bit abstract or disconnected. Food binds all this altogether."