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Food and Cities: Lecture by Carolyn Steel

Feeding cities arguably has a greater social and physical impact on us and our planet than anything else we do. Yet few of us in the West are conscious of the process. Food arrives on our plates as if by magic, and we rarely stop to wonder how it might have got there.

In her book 'Hungry City' (Chatto & Windus 2008) Carolyn Steel follows food’s journey from land to city, through market and supermarket, kitchen and table, waste-dump and back again, to show how food affects all our lives, and impacts on the planet. This raises the question of how we might use food to re-think cities in the future – to design them and their hinterlands more effectively, and live in them better too.

In this Royal Town Planning Institute in Scotland lecture Carolyn expands upon the topics explored in this book with engaging insight into the relationship between cities and food- from the distant history of how access to food fundamentally shaped cities to the modern disjuncture between farm and food product in modern day society.

Carolyn Steel MA (Cantab) Dip Arch RIBA is an architect, lecturer and writer. Her chief interest is in exploring the inner lives of cities, and her work has focused on developing a lateral approach to urban design that looks at the everyday routines that shape cities and the way we inhabit them. Since qualifying from Cambridge University in 1984, Carolyn has combined practice with teaching, writing and research. She joined Kilburn Nightingale Architects in 1989, since then she has completed several buildings for the Central School of Speech and Drama. She has run successful design units at Cambridge, London Metropolitan University, and at the London School of Economics, where she was inaugural studio director of the Cities Programme. Carolyn was a Rome Scholar in 1995-6, researching the historical urban order of the Ghetto. She has presented on BBC TV’s 'One Foot in the Past', has written for Blueprint Magazine and is a regular columnist for Building Design.

Carolyn has run design studios at the London School of Economics, London Metropolitan University and at Cambridge University, where her lecture course ‘Food and the City’ was an established part of the degree programme.

Link to Carolyn Steel's Blog

Architecture + Design Scotland would like to apologise for a technical error which occurred during recording that has resulted in the loss of 5 minutes of coverage towards the end of this video.