Innovations at the Nexus of Food + Energy + Water Symposium.

LAWRENCE — The University of Kansas Department of Architecture is hosting INFEWS: Innovations at the Nexus of Food + Energy + Water Symposium. The event will join distinguished researchers and design professionals from across the U.S. with faculty and students from KU departments to study issues related to the health of interrelated food, energy and water systems and the built environment. These have been subjected to increasing pressure from climate change, population growth and resource depletion. The event will start Jan. 21 and ends at noon Jan. 23. The third annual Water Charrette for students is part of the symposium, as is a three-hour workshop on green roofs sponsored by Tremco. It is the third year in a row the department has put on an event related to these topics.

- See more at: http://news.ku.edu/architecture-dept-hosting-food-energy-water-symposium#sthash.rkXPXMuO.dpuf

Livable Cities

9th Making Cities Liveable Conference 2016
The 9th Making Cities Liveable Conference will be held at the Pullman Melbourne on the Park from the 27-28 June 2016. The Making Cities Liveable Conference supports improving the quality of life in our capitals and major regional cities, focusing on healthy, sustainable, resilient and liveable cities, with discussions on improving the quality of life in our capitals and major regional cities.

2016 Program Topics

The Conference Program will include an extensive range of topics with Keynotes, Concurrent Sessions, Case Studies, Panel Discussions and Poster Presentations. Topics will include:

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More Milan

"...While Herzog has a point that the planned structures are indeed fantastical, it is debatable whether interesting, informative exhibitions and wild pavilion designs are mutually exclusive. Furthermore, innovations in architecture, construction, and urban design are an integral part of how the world will address the food challenges of the 21st century..."

"...However, there are a handful of designs that stand out as attempts to rethink the way we build and how it relates to modern agriculture and sustainable food production for the next century. Most of the pavilions use sustainable materials and construction methods that utilize national building techniques. Inside, exhibitions—often interactive—showcase the biodiversity, culture, and food traditions of each nation..."

"...While the architecture of the Milan exposition overall continues the recent trends of the “vanity fair,” some fragments exist that might shed light on how architecture can interact with innovations in agriculture and food production in the coming decades. Ideally, this concept would be pushed much further, but for now these will have to serve as examples for future projects..."

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Milan Expo

"The World Expo is once again upon us. Last time it was Shanghai's turn, now Milan plays host to the gargantuan global trade fair.

The original master-planners, a team that included Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, walked out in 2011 after their vision for a new typology of the Expo, one based on content rather than the individualist (and often propagandist) architecture of national pavilions, was rejected by the organisers."

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Milan Charter

MILAN CHARTER

Past world's fairs have given the world the sewing machine, the Eiffel Tower and ketchup. This one will produce the "Milan Charter," an expert document that seeks to raise awareness about the universal right to a "healthy, safe and sufficient" food supply.

The document seeks commitments from individuals, groups and businesses to ensure food security, decrease food waste and combat hunger and obesity. Pope Francis, who agrees that food is a basic right, is speaking Friday via video at the opening of the Expo.

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Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security

Titled ‘Landscape as Infrastructure for Biodiversity and Food Security: Perspectives from Switzerland and Qatar’, the day-long event will feature a series of lectures and a workshop on green roofs. 

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urban architecture in the UAE

“Food is a very good barometer of how successful we are at managing our relationships with the climate, temperatures, sun, water, everything.”

Mr Rodriguez said although the use of rooftops for farming was an attractive idea, “there are fundamentals that have to be guided by a submission to the conditions”. Farming indoors could be an option to avoid the intensive heat, given the existing technology for viable production, he said.

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Food Studies

The Food Studies Knowledge Community

This knowledge community is brought together around a common interest in exploring new possibilities for sustainable food production and human nutrition. Our aim is to consider the dimensions of a ‘new green revolution’ that will meet our human needs in a more effective, equitable and sustainable way in the twenty-first century. The community interacts through an innovative, annual face-to-face conference, as well as year-round online relationships, a peer reviewed journal, and book series – exploring the affordances of the new digital media. Members of this knowledge community include academics, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and practitioners. 

Conference

The conference is built upon four key features: Internationalism, Interdisciplinarity, Inclusiveness, and Interaction. Conference delegates include leaders in the field as well as emerging artists and scholars,  who travel to the conference from all corners of the globe and represent a broad range of disciplines and perspectives. A variety of presentation options and session types offer delegates multiple opportunities to engage, to discuss key issues in the field, and to build relationships with scholars from other cultures and disciplines.

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Slow Food Pavilion

"Herzog & de Meuron have unveiled the design for their Slow Food Pavilion, due for completion by the 2015 Milan Expo in May. Showcasing the work of Carlo Petrini’s Slow Food organization, the pavilion promotes the global organization’s vision of universal access to “good, clean and fair food.”

Sited on a triangular piece of land in the Eastern end of the Expo’s central boulevard, the pavilion uses a a triangular configuration of tables to evoke what Herzog & de Meuron describe as “an atmosphere of refectory and market.”

The tripartite pavilion is subdivided into a theatre, exhibition space, and tasting zone, with each program occupying compact areas of less than 455-square-meters apiece. Herzog & de Meuron’s understated approach mirrors the grassroots nature of Slow Food, and is a conscientious effort to foreground agriculture and food production as against architectural showmanship."

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food and race

Titled the “Race and Food Justice Panel,” Monday’s lecture examined food and agriculture in terms of their historical and current impacts on the city. The lecture also explored how food helped shaped present racial relationships within the city.

The panel included local activist Oya Amakisi; Kami Pothukuchi, professor of Urban Studies at Wayne State University; and Anthony Hatinger, garden production coordinator for the Central Detroit Christian Community Development Corporation.

Sucher said the panel aimed to look at social justice from a unique lens and to push students to look at race and hunger in Detroit from an angle they might not have thought about before.

“We just really wanted to focus on different areas of food justice,” she said. “Social justice doesn’t just happen one way, you can look at the same problem and have a lot of different solutions for it.”

...Pothukuchi, who was raised in Mumbai, India, employs her work in architecture and community planning to find links between communities and their food systems. Similar to Hatinger, Pothukuchi noted the importance of addressing Detroit’s larger problems including water shutoffs, housing shortages and poor land quality.

“We don’t really plan for food, that thinking is shifting partly due to the work my colleagues and I have done in raising awareness between the links between community planning and food systems and how integral those links are and how many community goals you can advance by intervening in the food system,” she said.

The dialogue brought in the panelists’ backgrounds and their wide array of experiences to help explain barriers to food accessibility within the city.

Hatinger said power-holders like politicians and corporations oppressed residents by controlling the distribution and access to food and thus limiting the resources of the general public. He added that learning about the dynamics of power and giving food resources back to the people is what propels him to do his work with agriculture in the city.

Full Article here:
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Dubai in Food

On the centerpiece, engraved and written in English and Arabic with toasted almonds on a rice bed, it said: “Welcome to The Dubai Food Festival.”

This stunning installation of Dubai’s famous skyline and iconic buildings made entirely out of food....

But it also was a great temptation to want take a bite out of the Trade Center made of white and milk chocolate.

Paul Baker said the greatest challenge was that the entire food architecture of the edible Dubai skyline will not go bad, as it needs to stay in shape when it is being shipped to Dubai, and remain that way when it is on display during the Dubai Food Festival, which takes place from February 6-28, 2015.

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Herald Design Forum

The Herald Design Forum 2014, a celebration of creativity and innovation in design, will explore the changes that design will bring to life in its fourth edition in November.

Under the title “Design Spectrum, Expanding the Definition of Design,” the forum, organized by Herald Corp., will discuss the influences of design in various fields, including architecture, product design, fashion and food. 

The forum will kick off with talks by celebrated architects Rem Koolhaas and Joon Paik. Koolhaas, professor at Harvard University and curator of the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, is one of the most influential figures in contemporary architecture. His recent works include the CCTV headquarters in Beijing and the Shenzhen Stock Exchange’s new building. He also designed a gallery space in the Samsung Museum of Art and the Museum of Art, Seoul National University. 

Peter Callahan, caterer and food stylist, will talk about incorporating design elements to food presentation based on his catering experience to the U.S. President Barack Obama, Martha Stewart, Vera Wang and Tory Burch. 

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Value Farm

"Value Farm creates value by cultivating the land as a collective effort. The project intersects issues of urban transformation, architecture and urban agriculture with an international cultural event, and explores the possibilities of urban farming in the city and how that can integrate with community-building. It forms part of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013, within Ole Bouman’s Value Factory located at the Shekou Former Guangdong Glass Factory in Shenzhen, a site that is itself undergoing radical transformation. Responding to the Biennale’s theme of ‘Urban Border’ and Shekou’s post-industrial regeneration, Value Farm is realized as new architectural and landscape design providing permanent infrastructure for the site’s future as well as a substantial piece of performative, growing event-architecture throughout the biennale."

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International Gastronomic Center

"The objective of the current International Gastronomic Center competition for architecture students is the creation of a space for cultural exchange through gastronomy.

In this spirit, the International Gastronomic Center (IGC) will be a space for chefs from all around the world to exchange knowledge and share their experience in order to promote gastronomic research and for their own personal and professional enrichment."

Winners announced

"In a society that continually directs us towards the search for immediate satisfaction of our needs, we propose a space debtor SLOW philosophy. This movement proposes sensitize with the environment: in this case, food and all that it implies. We are getting used to the clock direct our lives, leaving us little time to stop and think and enjoy the action. The food should be a stimulus for sight, taste, smell, hearing and touch, has become a simple need to cover, a fact demonstrated by the abundant proliferation of restaurants 'fast food'. We propose a sum of spaces revive the senses through training and exchange activities ranging from receiving a cooking master class to learn how to grow in a garden."

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Swiss Expo Milan

swiss pavilion at expo milan highlights food consumption levels. the temporary structure comprises five individual towers that are each filled with local food produce that visitors can take away. however, the reserves are finite meaning that guests who take an excessive amount deprive others of the same right to food. as the units are emptied the platform upon which the structure stands is lowered, presenting the public with a visual representation of their consumption habits.

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Situating Food: Planning and Design for New Urban Food Systems
November 8, 2013 - 2:00pm to November 9, 2013 - 8:00pmABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
OBJECTIVE

Situating Food: Planning and Design for New Urban Food Systems will identify models and foster innovation along with criticism of issues that impact food security, food justice, production, access and cultural awareness, especially as they influence trends in urban revitalization.

Champions of the local food movement have held it up as a potential economic boom to urban populations, a step toward the true reformation of the industrial food system and catalyst for neighborhood identity, social cohesion, and urban resilience or rebirth. Simultaneously, emerging critics have decried such efforts as a paternalistic attempt to 'save' central city populations as gentrification displaces current residents and property values increase. Divergent discourses on the subject make the topic of local food a socially, politically, economically, and ecologically charged topic in need of discussion and healthy, inclusive models.

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Expo Milan 2015 - Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life

http://en.expo2015.org/

edible Austrian Pavilion

The edible Austrian Pavilion designed by Chris Precht from Prenda and Alex Daxböck won first runner-up in the international design competition for the Milan Expo 2015. Inspired by the 2015 expo theme “Feeding the Planet, Energy for Life,” the two artists submitted a very literal concept for the Italian design expo in order to encourage organic agricultural and local food sourcing.

Read more: Edible Austrian Pavilion Scoops First Runner Up for the 2015 Milan Expo | Inhabitat - Sustainable Design Innovation, Eco Architecture, Green Building 

Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative (GFJI)

Growing Food and Justice for All Initiative (GFJI) is an initiative aimed at dismantling racism and empowering low-income and communities of color through sustainable and local agriculture.

This comprehensive network views dismantling racism as a core principal which brings together social change agents from diverse sectors working to bring about new, healthy and sustainable food systems and supporting and building multicultural leadership in impoverished communities throughout the world.

The vision for this initiative is to establish a powerful network of individuals, organizations and community based entities all working toward a food secure and just world.

Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab

"Food is integral to human sustenance and to quality of life. Yet the food system which delivers food from farm to table is often overlooked in urban and regional planning decisions. The Food Systems Planning and Healthy Communities Lab (‘the Food Lab’) at the University at Buffalo is dedicated to research that critically examines the role of planning and policy in facilitating sustainable food systems and healthy communities. Under the leadership of Principal Investigator, Dr. Samina Raja, the ‘Food Lab’ team conducts research, builds capacity of planners through education and training, and engages in community-based efforts to build sustainable food systems and healthy communities. The Food Lab team conducts research in collaboration with research labs and centers within UB and elsewhere, as well as with community and planning organizations from across the United States."