food unites us

If politics divides us, it is surely food that unites. It is food that inspired most if not all the great campaigns to discover the world: spices that drove trade between the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans with Asia, the Arabs to cross the Indian Ocean, the Persians to find overland routes to India, the Europeans to discover the Americas.

While many, many wrongs were done during the great ages of Empire, the movement of people around the globe over the last 5,000 years in particular has been of infinite mutual benefit. As people discovered new cultures they discovered new ideas, new people to fall in love with, new books to read, new colours, new architecture, new foods.

In kitchens around the world, people welcomed new elements, new techniques of cooking, new ingredients, incorporated them into their own cuisines and synthesised them into new dishes.

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ReGen Village

It's no secret that today's aggressive agricultural techniques can take a heavy toll on the environment, both on the land used for crops and livestock, and in the surrounding atmosphere.

But a new vision of a more sustainable 'integrated neighbourhood' community is being implemented in the Netherlands, with the first of a series of high-tech farm villages set to be completed next year. The project, being built just outside of Amsterdam, is the brainchild of California-based developer ReGen Villages, and after its pilot community is finished in 2017, the company plans to bring the concept to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Germany.

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Paris 2050

"The plan for Paris Smart City 2050 proposes eight different types of towers. In brief: Mountain Towers, situated on the rue de Rivoli, uses solar power to create energy and purify water. The Antismog Towers repopulate old railroad tracks with greenery and housing whose energy needs are powered by wind. The Photosynthesis Towers repurpose a Montparnasse tower into a carbon-neutral vertical park. The Bamboo Nest Towers are an exoskeleton aimed at ecologically restructuring buildings in the Massena area. The Honeycomb Towers offer a model for affordable housing in which residents have vegetable gardens, hanging orchards, and solar power. The Farmscrapers Towers, are, as their name suggests, spaces for growing food. The Mangrove Towers aim to neutralize the ecological effects of the Gare du Nord train station, through which 700,000 travelers move each day; their photo-electrochemical skin and titanium-dioxide material can actually absorb and disintegrate smog molecules. Finally, the Bridge Towers offer new residential, business, and transit spaces that link different city districts."

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Food Hub Management Certificate Program

Food Hub Management Certificate Program
UVM’s Food Hub Management Professional Certificate Program – the first of its kind in the country – is an innovative blend of hands-on, community-based, online and on-campus learning that will prepare you for effective management of food hubs and provide you with essential tools to advance your career in food systems.

Develop Essential Knowledge & Skills

Business Planning & Assessment
Market Development & Value Chain Facilitation
Product Development, Marketing, & Sales
Purchasing & Supply Chain Management
Processing and Distribution
Facility/Warehouse Management
HR, Staffing, & Communication
Food Safety and Risk Management

Who should apply?

Individuals planning to create, lead, and/or manage a food hub.
Those with food hub experience and passion for a career in food systems who are looking for their next step.
Professionals seeking to enhance or change their career to a focus on the sustainable food market.
Staff members who are poised for leadership development within enterprises meeting the increasing demand for regionally sourced good food.

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retirement community + farming

TRFW News) A new retirement community, planned for the city of Singapore in the near future, will be combining senior living and urban farming. Homefarm, will not only support the aging population of Singapore, but will also help seniors continue living an active lifestyle in the comfort of their own residences.

SPARK, a global architecture studio with offices in Singapore, London, Beijing and Shanghai is responsible for this new endeavour and recently announced their plan for the new development to the public. (1,2,3)

Ninety Percent of Singapore’s Food is Imported
The new urban retirement housing will have a huge positive impact on Singapore’s food conditions. Currently, 90% of food is imported from over 70 different countries. In addition, twenty percent of Singapore’s population by 2030 will be older than 65.

Homefarm will not only provide local food to the population but the seniors, who will be living in the retirement community, will not be forced to work elsewhere. They will have the opportunity to contribute work towards their living expenses by farming. They will get a chance to plant, harvest, package, clean, sort and deliver produce. The gardens will be conveniently located in an assortment of various designs throughout the retirement community.(1,3)

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Food Hubs

Food Hubs, a topic of recent inquiry. The design of our food system to utilize, process, distribute, share and educate. This example comes from Louisville KY, and the Seed Capital Kentucky. 

"Seed Capital Kentucky released master plans for the food marketplace last week. Netherlands-based architect OMA worked alongside GBBN Architects of Louisville to design a campus where local farmers can package, distribute and sell goods."

"The project aims to reduce the amount of travel, money and time that goes into local food production, while making consumer access easier.

"Our vision for this project is one that collapses a lot of those middle men and transactions into one place where they can all work together to help create more fresh, regional food and help our region feed itself more sustainably," said Seed Capital Kentucky founder Stephen Reily."

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Food Webs

"Dr. Samuel Johnson, from Warwick’s Mathematics Institute, explains: “Buildings require structural supports, such as the metal or timber frames around which they are then built. For the building to remain standing, though, these supports need to comply with the laws of mathematics and physics; if the roof is too heavy for the frame, the building collapses. The frames also need flexibility to adapt to conditions, if they are too rigid they become fragile and, for instance, unable to cope with difficult weather.

“The same is true of natural ecosystems; they need support and structure. Trophic Coherence seems to play a similar role in ecosystems as supporting frames of buildings — it is a structural property that helps ecosystems survive, and is common to all the ones we have analyzed. It provides them with essential support and structure.”"

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Visual Complexity

Floating Gardens of Bangladesh

"...three years ago, Ms. Khatun was trained by Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization, to tend an unusual source of food and income: a floating farm with a duck coop, fish enclosures and vegetable garden moored by rope to the riverbank."

Floating farms — and produce that can flourish in flood conditions — are a way to help Bangladeshis live with rising waters.

“There is big demand for solutions for climate change-affected areas,” said Mohammed Rezwan, the founder and executive director of Shidhulai.

With the extra income from selling eggs, fish and vegetables, Ms. Khatun started saving money in a bank for the first time, bought a bed to keep her and her family off wet ground in their dirt-floored home, and helps her husband support the family.

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Genetic toolkits

Here, we get specialized on the topic of "architecture and food". Genetic Modification, or GMO crops are designed food. I am intrigued how they use "modified architectures" to describe the manipulation of plants. Plants have a structure, and technology has allowed us to see and understand that structure...and thus, we have been able to re-build our food - deconstruct and then reconstruct our dinner. 

"Ancient humans and early plant breeders recognized that selecting plants with modified architectures could have a major impact on the amount of fruit they produce. In general scientific terms, Lippman explains, "Plant architecture results from a delicate balance between vegetative growth – shoots and leaves – and flower production. To increase crop yields, we want plants to produce as many flowers and fruits as possible, but this requires energy – energy that is produced in leaves."

"Traditionally, plant breeders have relied on natural variation in plant genes to increase yield, but yield gains are plateauing," Lippman notes. "There is an immediate need to find new ways for plant breeders to produce more food." Worldwide more than 842 million people do not receive adequate nourishment, about 1 person in 8 alive today. The cost of food is expected to increase and hunger is likely to become more widespread as the global population expands to beyond 9 billion by 2050."

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Read more: Getting more out of nature: Genetic toolkit finds new maximum for crop yields http://www.nanowerk.com/news2/biotech/newsid=37951.php#ixzz3I79kyici 
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Food Hacks

I was familiar with "design hacks" more in terms of IKEA products than architecture or food. But, this act of 'hacking' - or taking something with an intended purpose or function and using it in an uncoventional way to recieve an intended, personal outcome - has been thrown around more and more. It's incredibly creative and can have an impact of personalization, customization, and optimization by getting more or better out of something that you already have. 

Design does this. We could learn a lot about architecture and design from hacks. Where are architecture hacks in our everyday world?

Here are some pretty cleaver food hacks.

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Farmers to Urbanites

I have been following this mass population migration in China of rural farmers moving into cities and the governments initiative to make it happen. Here, another report seeking to have 60% of the population living in a city brings more than a number of questions and issues. Food, the people that grew it, the land, the cities and the food it needs. So many opportunities.

When I was living in Chongqing in 2001-2002 I traveled down the Yangze River just prior to the massive relocation. A number of villages were be completely relocated to make way for the raising waters of the Yangze dam. Traditional, ornate, sustainable villages were being uprooted to concrete, high rise cities that may have an updated infrastructure, but lacked a deep sense of place and tradition. One of those being local subsistence patterns and small scale farming.

Enter the creative solutions of people moving from rural to urban. Chickens in the bathroom to farming on the sidewalk...so many lessons to be learned and design opportunities for these new cities housing a population living between two worlds.

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MoGro

MoGro, The Mobile Grocery store, uses a temperature-controlled truck to provide access to healthy, affordable food in communities that currently lack access due to physical location and cost.

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