Research Collection

Journal Issue

Gazette

Publication Date: 2011

Permanent Link: https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-a-010643007

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ETH Library

Making Future CitiesFuture Cities Laboratory

First International Conference12-14 September, Singapore

LONDON – An architect by training, fascinated by the practicalities of siting, building and supplying cities, Carolyn Steel points out that one of the strangest things about feed-ing the modern urban world is ‘the sheer invisibility of the process’. Its paraphernalia litters the landscape even in this country, but is not at all easy to see. She describes an illicit visit to one of 70 regional distribution centres or RDCs, a nameless ‘national food hub’. The place was not only

anonymous but so incon-spicuous as to be virtually indescribable: a collection of airport-sized sheds, ‘vast boxes clad in crinkly-white tin, so featureless that only the dozens of lorries crowd-ing their loading bays, like piglets at the belly of some monstrous sow, give any idea of their true scale’.

Places like this embody the secretive side of agri-business. In China, where the whirlwind transition from ancient to modern

lifestyles is a cause for pride rather than concealment, the process takes tangible shape in the swirling white mists of pollution or brickdust rising over every city, town and vil-lage. The world’s population became for the first time pre-dominantly urban last year. Another 400 million people are expected to urbanise in China in the next quarter-century. In 1962 the average Chinese ate 4kg of meat a year (Guardian, 8 June 2008).

HILARY SPURLING

12 September PMKeynote Lecture: Sitopia - Shaping the World

Through FoodCarolyn Steel

City and Country

Edited extract from Carolyn Steel’s Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (Chatto & Windus, 2008) for Making Future Cities conference, Singapore.

The origins of agriculture are obscure, but what can be said with some degree of certainty is that be-fore farming came along, there were no cities. Half a million years before grain was on the menu, our ances-tors were nomadic hunter-gatherers who spent their lives tracking the

Sitopia – Shaping the World Through Food

LONDON -- Food is the root of life. Our need to eat shapes our daily existence as humans, yet, for those of us living in cities, it also creates a paradox. Our urban lifestyles depend upon sustenance from elsewhere: a place we persist in calling ‚the countryside‘, although the images conjured by such a term often bear little resemblance to the realities of modern food production.

Of all the resources needed to sustain a city, none is more vital than food. Before industrialisation, this was clearly understood, since the physical challenges of producing and transporting food made its supply the dominant priority of every urban authority. No city was ever built without first considering where its food was to come from, and perishable produce, such as fruit and vegetables, were grown as locally as possible, often in the city fringes. Meat and fish were consumed seasonally, with the excess preserved by salting, drying or pickling. Nothing was wasted: leftover scraps were fed to pigs and chickens, and human and animal waste was collected and spread as manure. The sights and smells of food at every stage of its urban journey were inescapable.

Things are very different today. The advent of railways in the 19th century emancipated cities from geography, making it possible to build them any size, shape, and place. As cities sprawled, food systems industrialised, and for the first time in history, the two began to grow apart. While architects and planners strove to create cities free of mess and smell, food companies sought ever-greater ‘efficiencies’ in the pursuit of profit. As the relative cost of transport shrank, food production was increasingly located, not close to cities, but in places where natural resources and cheap labour could be most readily exploited.

Our very concept of a city, inherited from a distant, predominantly rural past, assumes that the means of supporting urbanity can be endlessly extracted from the natural world. But can it? Food and agriculture today account for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Twenty million hectares of forest are lost each year to logging and agriculture, while a similar amount of arable land is lost to salinisation and erosion. Eighty-five percent of global fish-stocks are either depleted or fully exploited. Seventy percent of the world’s freshwater is used for farming, while rivers and aquifers worldwide run dry. Each calorie of food we consume in the West takes an average of ten to produce, yet one half of the food produced in the USA is wasted (Stuart 2009). A billion people worldwide go hungry, while a further billion are overweight, one third of those obese. Food riots are increasingly common as failed harvests, soaring oil prices, bio-fuels and commodity speculation push food prices to record levels. Despite our technical ability, it seems, we are no closer to solving the urban paradox than were our ancient ancestors.

In the past, so few people lived in cities (just three per cent in 1800) that their ecological impact was relatively limited. Today, with over half the global population living in cities and the number expected to double by 2050, the opposite is true. Nothing short of a complete review of our way of life is required if we are to avoid ecological calamity. Yet our social, political and economic systems are set against such a shift. In order to cope with complex and interconnected problems, we need new ways of thinking and acting. We need instruments better attuned to the conditions of modernity, better able to respond to uncertainty. But where are we to find such tools?

Food provides an answer. Our most vital shared commodity, food is embedded in our lives socially, physically, and symbolically. Our landscapes and cities were shaped by food. Our daily routines revolve around it, politics and economies are driven by it, our identities are inseparable from it, our survival depends on it. What better tool, then, with which to shape our world? Since we must all eat, the question of how we should eat approximates to that of how we should live. Through food, we can judge whether or not the life we lead is ‘good’ in every sense: ethical, equitable and sustainable. We can create sitopia (food-place): a society in which food-based values are commonly shared and practiced. CAROLYN STEEL

annual migrations of the beasts that formed the basis of their diet. Permanent settlements were about as much use to them as they were to the animals they hunted.

At the end of the last Ice Age, that began to change. As the ice retreated north, it left behind a swathe of land so rich in natural foods that it has been dubbed the ‘Fertile Crescent’ (Fig. 1). The ter-ritory, which ran northwards from the Nile Delta, along the eastern seaboard of the Mediterranean as far as southern Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then southwards again through Mesopotamia (Iraq), blos-somed into an arcadia of oak forests

Biography. Carolyn Steel is an architect, lecturer and writer. A director of Kilburn Nightingale Ar-chitects in London, she has taught at the London School of Economics, Cambridge and Wagen-ingen Universities. Her 2008 book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, is a key text in the emergent field of food planning. Carolyn is much in demand internationally as a speaker on Food and Cities, and is currently developing her concept of sitopia (food-place), as a design tool.

Academic Qualifications. MA (Hons) Cantab, Dip. Arch, RIBA

Publications/Exhibitions/Awards. Steel, Caro-lyn (2008). Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. London: Chatto & Windus. Steel, Carolyn (2006). Royal Society of Literature Award for Non-Fiction: winner (£10,000) for Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives. Steel, Carolyn (1995-1996). Rome Scholar, British School at Rome: The Mundane Order of the City: a study of 2000 years of everyday life in Rome‘s Rione S. Angelo.

Carolyn Steel

Issue

04

Date

12/09/2011

Fold, Punch, File

FCL – Future Cities Laboratory

Tags

Food, Good Government, Harvest, Polis, Rome, Hunger, Meat and Fish, Pigs and Chickens, Sitopia

Editorial Team

Executive Editor: Franz OswaldEditor: Stephen CairnsCopy-Editor: Kevin Lim

Published by

FCL – Future Cities LaboratorySingapore ETH Centre for Global Environmental Sustainability (SEC)c/o National University of Singapore (NUS), 117566 Singaporegazette @ fcl.arch.eth.ch

GazeTTe

SECFig. 1. The fertile crescent

and wild grasses, the ancestors of modern wheat and barley.

The first attempts of early farm-ers to harvest wild grain must have been frustrating. The ears had to be gathered at the exact moment of ripening, or they would burst, scat-tering their seed and leaving nothing but an inedible husk. Pioneer har-vesters probably set up temporary camps next to the fields in order to make sure that they were there at the critical moment; a practice that led to the establishment of settled villages, such as those found in Palestine from around 10,000 BC. The grain was laboriously processed by winnowing, threshing and stone-

Epilogue

In January 2011, a price index compiled by the United Nations Food and Agricul-ture Organization that tracks 55 food commodities for export hit its highest level since tracking began in 1990. Four main factors are seen as driving prices higher: weather, higher demand, smaller yields and crops diverted to biofuels. Volatile weather patterns often attributed to climate change are wreaking havoc with some harvests. Heavy rains in Australia damaged wheat to the extent that much of its usually high-quality crop has been downgraded to feed, experts noted. An ever larger portion of the world’s crops is being diverted for biofuels, as developed countries pass laws mandating greater use of nonfossil fuels and as emerging powerhouses like China seek new sources of energy (New York Times, 7 April 2011).

grinding, and ground up to make an edible paste – a sort of ancient porridge.

The discovery of this earliest of processed foods was to prove pivotal. For the first time in history, here was a food that could be gathered and stored in large enough quantities to allow people to live in permanent settlements. Grain was the means by which the land could be made to yield a food surplus, and its cultiva-tion and harvesting would become key to the world‘s first cities.

The fact that our words ‘culture’ and ‘culti-vate’ share the same stem (the Roman cultus) tells its own story. Cultivation and civilisation in the ancient world were inextricably linked. To Homer, man was, simply, ‘bread-eater’: a creature whom agriculture had transformed from a savage beast into a cultured, thinking being.

For the Greeks and Romans, the bond between city and country took on greater significance as their empires spread. With new cities to be founded in distant territories, choosing the right sites and ensuring their capacity to support life was vital. Sites for new Roman cities were chosen by augurs, who made careful observations of natural phenomena such as prevailing winds and

the movements of animals before choosing the right spot. The city was then bound to the ground by the digging of a pit, the mundus, into which sacrifices to the gods of the underworld were thrown. The mundus marked the city’s symbolic centre; through which it was ‘mar-ried’ to the soil. In Rome itself, the mundus was in the Forum Romanum, guarded night and day by vestal virgins, whose sacred duty it was to tend the fire that burnt there.

The Greeks and Romans accorded the rural hinterland a status equal to that of the cities in which they lived. The fields and vine-yards of ancient city-states were considered just as important as their streets and buildings, and rural citizens of the polis, or city-state of Athens, enjoyed equal rights to their urban counterparts. Many Athenian city-dwellers owned farms, and farmers came frequently to town in order to vote, or carry out business. Similarly, the cultivated land around Roman towns, the ager, was considered an extension of civitas, the city. The ager was distinguished from saltus, wild and unproductive nature, which the Romans viewed with disdain; even dread.

To Roman eyes, nature was split into two: the tame and the untamed, the productive

and the unproductive, the good and the bad. It was a view that would persist as urbanity strengthened its hold on European culture. One thousand years would pass after the fall of Rome before the next great flowering of urban culture in Europe, but with the Italian city-state, it arguably found its most perfect manifestation.

Siena‘s council chamber, the Sala della Nove, has one of the finest views in all of Italy. A large rectangular room set high within the city’s thirteenth-century town hall, it looks out over a classic Tuscan landscape, with its gently rolling patchwork of vineyards, olive groves, villas and cypresses. That the landscape has barely changed in six hundred years becomes evident when one looks at the frescoes decorating the room, painted by Ambrogio Lorenzetti in 1338. To the left is a fresco entitled the Effects of Good Government (Figures 2 and 3), depicting a tidy, well-maintained Siena surrounded by a neat landscape just like the one outside. Peasants till the fields, huntsmen set off with a pack of orderly hounds, a farmer enters the city with mules laden with corn, and another drives a flock of sheep to market. City and country exude peace and prosperity – which is more than can be said for the scenes on the opposite wall. In the Effects of Bad Govern-ment, war is raging in the countryside, the fields are a burnt-out wasteland, and Siena itself resembles a medieval sink estate, with broken windows, dilapidated buildings, and a populace intent on robbing and fighting one another. Even if Siena‘s Council of Nine never uttered a word in that room, the walls themselves would have carried the argument. Look after your countryside, and it will look after you.

Close involvement with farming was typical of city-dwellers of all classes in the pre-industrial world. Rich townsfolk often

had country estates from which they kept themselves supplied with grain, poultry and vegetables, while poorer ones kept smallhold-ings that they would leave the city to farm at harvest time. When the merchant classes, or bourgeois came on the scene, they operated somewhere in between, building themselves country houses in order to imitate the lifestyles of the rich, but also making money from com-mercial farming. As a result, the suburbs of Renaissance Rome were as full of farms and villas as they were in ancient times, with the difference that the average fifteenth-century farmer had a small olive grove or vineyard that he would tend himself. The city became so deserted at harvest times, that a statute had to be passed suspending civic justice during those periods.

Food was often grown in cities too. People commonly kept pigs and chickens in their houses, and grain and hay were often stored in yards too. Many houses doubled as urban farms well into the nineteenth century. The historian George Dodd described one ‘extraordinary piggery’ in London in 1850 as follows:

a group of wretched tenements, known as ‘The Potteries’, inhabited by a population of 1000 or 1200 persons, all engaged in the rearing of pigs; the pigs usually outnumbered the people three to one, and had their sties mixed up with the dwelling-houses; some of the pigs lived in the houses and even under the beds.

Whatever they might have thought of farming, no pre-industrial city-dweller could forget they existed. As the social historian Fernand Braudel remarked, ‘Town and country never separate like oil and water. They are at the same time separate yet drawn together, divided yet combined’.

Fig. 2. Effects of Good Government (detail), Ambrogio Lorenzetti Fig. 3. Effects of Good Government (detail), Ambrogio Lorenzetti