What’s on the Plate – Sustainable Urbanism on Food Production, Consumption and Dissipation

The late 1800s saw a proliferation of household manuals aimed at describing housekeeping, cooking and dining practices for the Victorian and Edwardian Households, and with the Empire, to British colonies in the rest of the world. In the studio, we re-think the ways we cook and dine with particular attention to kitchen and table arrangement, dining table and spatial organisation of the rooms while articulating what has become mundane culture/consumption of food. The aim is to document and create “manuals” for cooking and dining, to catalogue and observe transformations in current cooking and dining practices. Further, we will address scale and cyclical notion of food distribution, consumption and dissipation while confirming the current imbalance created between rural and urban. “The emptying of the countryside is having a more drastic impact than the intensification of the city. While the city becomes more itself, the countryside is transforming into something new” (Rem Koolhaas, Countryside, 2020) Design project must be strategic towards the distribution of functions that support production and logistics, spatial organisation for culture/consumption and conceptualizing sustainability within collection and dissipation of food waste to bring back to its production cycle.