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 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.

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Designing Better food for a hungry planet

“With more people changing from rural to urban society, there’s going to be a need to produce food in new ways. Urban farming is one of those. Whether it’s vertical farming, hydroponics, growing fish, agritourism, local farms, or U-picks — we’re trying to be at the forefront of these areas.”

“New crops are going to be really important in order to get vegetables that are designed to survive better,” she said. “We have all of these exotic pests and diseases coming in. We have to find a way to fight that difficulty.

“There’s a lot of exciting work done with specialty crop production — we’re trying to find alternative crops. Finding ways to increase shelf life of tomatoes. Finding plants that are of higher nutrition, that are better for us.”

To learn more about Purdue horticulture, visit www.ag.purdue.edu/hla.

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Designed Food Tools

Design and Kitchen tools. Not just for the starchitects!
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Restaurants take over old buildings

Architecture and Food - the rehabilitation of buildings for eating.
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Fast Food History

A recent opening of “White Towers Revisited” exhibition at Penn State has opened an interesting conversation on fast food, architecture, and preservation. 

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worlds food markets

"When it comes to fresh food, there has long been a dividing line between Britain, the United States – or English-speaking countries – and much of the rest of the world. Early and rapid industrialisation in the former led to a divorce between great swathes of the population and the land they once farmed.

Refrigeration, railways, suburban growth and the car have given rise to the supermarket, with its shrink-wrapped food, sell-by dates, and the branding and advertising of what we eat. Driving to edge-of-town supermarkets has resulted in the closure of family shops, the de-valuing of high streets and a decline in interaction between buyers, growers and sellers of food.

The role of the supermarket was once played by covered markets in Britain and North America just as it is today in much of the world where people still want to look closely at the food they plan to buy, and to enjoy the incomparable buzz and the feast of all senses covered markets offer."

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