Food systems: the design agenda
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Global food systems are becoming unsustainable in terms of environmental impact, health, and social quality. Up to 25 percent of the ecological impact of an 'advanced' city can be attributed to its food systems.
But what to do?
For Doors of Perception 9, we went to India in a search for inspiring new models and tools. [Participants this time - invited to Doors 9 after a Call- were active in live food-related projects in: Miami, New York, Portland, Toronto, Vancouver, Santiago. Havana, Florence, Dyestad, Newcastle, Middlesborough, London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Helsinki, Frankfurt, Naples, Dubai, Istanbul, Gaza, Jerusalem, Melbourne, Beijing, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore, Kolkota].
The text below is a personal reflection by John Thackara on what we learned. (Please note that this is Part One: Part Two follows soon).
Continue reading "Food systems: the design agenda"
By Kristi, May 2007 | Comments (0)
Event Reports + Pix
Alex and Sarah at Worldchanging.
Alex D-S at Tastythinking.
Debra Solomon at Culiblog.
Lots of pix are here at Flickr
and here
and here
and here are another 300 or so from CKS
More links are at Technorati.
And Diane Brady posted this story in Business Week
Diane Brady posted this story in Business Week.
And the guys making the film about Jimmy Wales posted this short film about their time in Delhi on YouTube.
Let us know if you stumble across any more. 
For a more detailed listing of events please go to "Programme"
By Kristi, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
Invitations
By Kristi, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
It's the loooong thing
"A team of researchers from the Cardiff Business School studied the chain of actions required to make a can of cola. The whole process, starting at the Bauxite mine in Australia, and passing through the various smelting and rolling processes to the manufacture of the can itself, printing its label, filling it with the cola and finally getting it into somebody’s refrigerator, took no less than 319 days. Only three hours were spent on manufacturing, the rest of the time was spent in storage and transport, as many as 14 storage lots and warehouses were involved". This excellent piece in Mute by Brian Ashton, Logistics – The Factory Without Walls, pulls together many important issues to do with logistics and the new economy.
Brian Ashton:
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
Project Leaders Round Table - programme
(Updated Sunday 25th)
Our programming and production team is now massively expanded. D&G (Debra Solomon and Garrick Jones) are joined by Joost Wijermars and Srishti Bajaj. Preparations are going so well we should call it a Smoothie rather than a Round Table.
Joost (Delhi mobile) number: +91 991 077 8481 (info@joostwijermars.nl)
Srishti +91 199 1027 0689 (srishti.bajaj@alumni.rca.ac.uk)
Concerning how you get to present your project, having gone all the way to India to do so, there are three opportunities:
a) first, informally, at the Project Leaders Round Table at Global Arts Village (Tuesday or Wednesday evening and maybe Thursday morning): The format for Tuesday-Thursday is a mixture of plenary 'camp fire' chats and expeditions into the city to get more input.
b) some projects, but not all, will be asked to present during the conference on Saturday. I have not micro-organised the sessions on Saturday labelled "projects" yet - but will do so my mid-week.
c) During the Social Innovation Salon on Saturday evening. We offer you all a space to put up an A0 format poster or similar and talk to people then.
The updated (but not-cast-in-stone) excursions are as follow below. Expect to make a final choice on Tuesday evening. (Bear with us if your first choice may be full; we want to limit groups to six or seven people).
Snack City Workshop with Sophea Lerner & Kaustubh Srikanth
From digital snackfood as an interface to the city, to the participatory radio kitchen...workshop participants are invited to explore Delhi streetfood in the context of changes taking place across the city. Street snack surfing research and hands on DIY hybrid radio will be collectively cooked up into a performance radio cart as part of MWF and live_feed online broadcast with foodradio_network.?We exchange recipes and we share ingredients, exploring models of open content and accessible technologies. Our recipes are in a state of constant variation as we experiment with the ingredients and utensils at hand. What is interesting about radio as a live network between remote locations is the location and not merely the fact that it is remote. Here and there have different flavors. Food, like sound, enters the body and indexes it in place and time. Listen globally, eat locally.
Water Mapping with Georg Christoph Bertch
Reflecting Waters is an intercultural / interdisciplinary project which Georg Bertsch started together with Yaarah Bar On at the Bezalel Academy Jersualem in 2006. "In Delhi we shall do a elementary city water map based on research and discussion and ask about the aesthetics of water" says Georg. We have 49 grid squares of the city and a day or two to do the research. Everybody will need about a day to travel the city, visit some square grids and ask people at shops and markets four to five questions about how they deal with water on an everyday basis. (It can easily be done while doing other visits and research in the city). Besides getting a real impression of the city you will have a lot of fun talking to people while having a tea or just strolling around. Arlene Birt is going to create the Water Map that will be one of the essential documents of the team works at the conference".
Street Food and Urban Markets Tours with Nitin Das
India has an incredibly rich and diverse culture of street food. The variety is remarkable, and stalls provide snacks and meals to millions on a daily basis. The foods of the north and the south, the Tibetan mountains, and the rich local traditions are all to be found in the street food vendors. Join us for an exploration and tasting of the Street Vendors lives, foods and processes.
Urban Agriculture with Sunil Abraham
Although some forms of urban and peri-urban agriculture are based on temporary use of vacant lands, urban agriculture as such is a permanent feature of many cities in developing as well as developed countries. In fact, urban agriculture increases the efficiency of national food systems by supplying perishable products such as vegetables, fresh milk and poultry products, complements rural agriculture by positively impacting urban food security as it decreases foodmiles – the distance between field and plate. Besides the economic benefits for the producers, urban agriculture stimulates the development of related micro-enterprises: the production of necessary agricultural inputs and the processing, packaging and marketing of outputs. Input production and delivery may include activities like the collection and composting of urban wastes, production of organic pesticides, fabrication of tools, delivery of water, buying and bringing of chemical fertilisers, etc.)
Wastewater/greywater in urban agriculture
The use of wastewater/grey or black water in urban agriculture can play an important role in the urban environmental management system. For most cities in developing countries, the disposal of urban wastes has become a serious problem. Urban agriculture can help to solve such problems by turning urban wastes into a productive resource. Farmers may use wastewater for irrigating their farms when they lack access to other sources of water or because of its high price. The use of fresh (untreated) wastewater has the additional advantage for poor urban farmers that it contains a lot of nutrients (although often not in the proportions required by their soils and crops). More and more experience is being gained in public-private initiatives involving private enterprises and/or civic organisations in the development and management of municipal wastewater treatment plants. (Curiously nobody has leaped forward to lead this one yet).
Langar
Langars are Sikh community kitchens located at the place of worship in which devotees donate food and labour. The word langar comes from the Persian word for alms house, but not only poor people eat at the Langar. Considered to be a part of a Sikh’s way of showing devotion to the guru, the custom and institution of Langar was originated with the intention of abolishing caste distinction. Every Sikh place of worship, or gurdwara has a langar. Every Sikh is expected to take part in the running of the kitchen by either paying for the expenses, bringing provisions or by personally taking part in the cooking process, washing the dishes, fetching water and fuel or taking part in the cooking and distribution of the food At important Sikh temples on holy days a Langar may serve up to 20,000 people.
Scalability in Food Distribution: supermarkets, farmers’ markets, short & long food chains with Nitin Soanes
In this excursion, the idea will be to experience the two extremes of scale in terms of food distribution. At the Hanuman Mandir (temple) near Delhi’s Connaught Place a cow poops out paddies that a woman will form and allow to dry upon the roofs of the accompanying buildings, later to be sold as household fuel. At the Wholesale grain Distribution Centre, 17 sorts of rice is redistributed for use over entire regions of India and the rest of the world. This excursion will be an adventure to find Delhi’s largest and the smallest food chains.
Food recycling, composting, food reappropriation
India’s complex society has developed over the centuries many interesting and common sense ways of recycling, composting and reappropriating food and food waste. This is not necessarily linked to poverty, but is encouraged by the spiritual attitudes of many. This excursions will explore the social systems that have developed to ensure minimal food waste, and reappropriation of resources.
The academic experience with Garrick Jones
Plug in to some of the worlds leading laboratories and academic departments in food research, urban agriculture and food security (to name a few) and meet Indian academics. The Energy and Resources department at the Institute Habitat Centre is one example of a team leading research in Biosciences. Delhi is an important centre for research. State your preferences and anybody you may want to meet. We’ll see what we can arrange.
Local Farms visits with Rit Mishra
India's farmers mostly practice organic methods, passed down for millenia. Organic fertilizer and natural pest control are the only tools available to most farmers, who have always lacked the financial resources to explore chemical solutions. This excursion will visit local farms and meet with local farmers. Rit will be working with the latest methods and tools for design research.
Ride-on-dinner with Mick Douglas
Mick Douglas is an Australian artist, senior lecturer at RMIT University and founder of tramtactic.net who makes hybrid-artform public domain projects that are collaborative, cross-cultural and transportative. Recent experimental projects include 'Ride-on-Dinner' - a participatory performance project involving host artists serving up a 3-course slow-food meal to a swarm of cyclists over the duration of evening cycle rides. For the Doors of Perception / MediaWala festival he hopes to collaborate with others to develop a food and human energy event that explores relationships between transport, energy, food, local knowledge and practices of social conviviality.
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
Squishing it into the Slimy Depths of the Tethys Sea
Some of you may have shared my incomplete comprehension of the precise form the MediaWala Festival will take. That's because, I now realise, we put the horse before the carts. And we are the horses.
MediaWalon Ka Rathotsav (The MediaWala Cart Festival) is a performative installation of diverse forms of media on a set of self propelled carts adorned with sound, light, food, energy, comms, and information. Artists and designers from around the world will be involved in constructing, installing and performing upon these carts.
The carts:
Streetfood Radiothela by foodradio_network (India)
Quicksand presents in technicolor... by Quicksand (India)
Apsara VJ Thela by Mo Ling Chui (Canada/ China)
Cycling Diners by Mick Douglas and team (Australia/ India)
Dancing Around Trees featuring Keity Anjoure (France) and Ville Hyvönen (Finland)
From Karthikeya to Kurt by Karthikeya Acharya and Vinay Silva (India)
Toploaded Whirlpool of Lassi by Hari Nair and Team (India)
Theka on Wheels by Seagrams (India)
McVideogames by La Molleindustria (Italy)
Emotions in Man by Kati Aberg (Finland)
Le Ciel Est Bleu (France)
Squishing it into the Slimy Depths of the Tethys Seaby Abhishek Hazra (India)
Hawker Caterers Inc by Ghitorni street food hawkers (India).
Thursday, 1st March 2007
7 pm to 10:30 pm
Global Arts Village
Utsav Mandir Foundation
Tropical Drive. Mehrauli-Gurgaon Road, Gittorni
New Delhi 110 030
Continue reading "Squishing it into the Slimy Depths of the Tethys Sea"
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
It's not just the miles
Don't expect this food thing to be simple. As Ian Brown reminds us on his Fair Tracing blog today, the distance travelled by a product is only one component of its ecological impact. All the transport mechanisms used, and the amount of other goods carried at the same time, also need to be taken into account.
Ian quotes one UK minister as saying that “flowers flown from Africa can use less energy overall than those produced in Europe because they’re not grown in heated greenhouses”. A total-energy-used metric has also been used to show that "tomatoes grown outdoors in Spain, then flown to the UK are responsible for fewer carbon emissions than UK tomatoes grown in heated greenhouses".
Which may be true. But is it relevant? Just because because a product flown from another country is "responsible for fewer carbon emissions than its UK equivalent", does not mean it its import is sustainable. The crunch issue is how much we have to reduce resource flows and emissions overall - not whether one flow is less damaging than another.
Discussion of that Final Number is where argument gets really heated. Some say we have to reduce by 60%. Others talk publicly about "Factor Four" (and in private say it's factor 20). And who gets to decide what the Number is? Scientists? Politicians? Designers?
Also responding to Ian's post, Edward Griffith-Jones refers us to a paper he's just written on The negative development impacts of a food miles approach to agriculture.
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
Organoponicos
I learned this morning that Cuba's 7,000 urban allotments are called "organoponicos". Organoponicos are market gardens growing organic produce on every patch of wasteland across the capital, Havana. The gardens were born of necessity, when the countrys state-organized farming system collapsed with the demise of the Soviet Union a decade ago and cheap imports of agrochemicals ceased. Now their constant supply of vegetables stops the city from starving, and is helping to pioneer new intensive methods of farming without chemicals. It's localised food economy in action. Andre Viljoen surely knew this already (he is speaking at the conference on Saturday) but was too polite to use the word when he came to Newcastle for a Dott 07 Explorers Club on urban farming.
Continue reading "Organoponicos"
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
"Reflecting waters" project for Delhi, anyone?
Georg-Christof Bertsch proposes to run a live project to create an elementary city water map based on research and discussion about the aesthetics of water.
"Where are the places where water can be drink without worry? Why is it drunk without worry in places where one should be very worried? Why is water treated so badly? What can we positively learn from Delhi?".
"I shall give an introduction to the learning from German, Israeli, Turkish steps from the project plus an introductory talk on water in general. We will then form a group which does short interviews with people in different places in the city and do simple chemical water analysis. We end up with a simple water map of the city.
Continue reading ""Reflecting waters" project for Delhi, anyone?"
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
"Ride-on dinner", anyone?
Mick Douglas, co-creator of the sublime Tramtactic project, proposes for Delhi that we stage a 'ride on dinner'. A prototype event has already taken place in Melbourne. "I would like to get the eating people moving (ideally by pedalling) and changing environment" says Mick, " motivated by curiosity,excitement and group dynamics, engaged in their body energy in ways that has a little demand on their body, and that literally changes their relationship to environment and space (more than say, dancing on one spot usually does). 250 people (the number we expect at MediaWala festival) is of course a LOT, so I know we have to work around that".
STOP PRESS: Mick's retinue of cycling diners has been appointed 'Official Caterers to the MediaWala Festival' which takes place on the evening of 1st Mar.
Continue reading ""Ride-on dinner", anyone?"
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
Doors 9 Press Release
(We are sending this out as an email but please also pass on this url to media contacts)
DOORS OF PERCEPTION 9 ON “JUICE”: FOOD, FUEL, DESIGN.
http://www.doorsofperception.com/juice/
NEW DELHI, INDIA, 2, 3 MARCH 2007
MEDIA CONTACTS
Europe: desk@doorsofperception.com telephone: +44 7738 546 433 India: zeenath.hasan@gmail.com
PICTURES FOR PRE-PUBLICATION; DOWNLOAD FROM:
http://doors8delhi.doorsofperception.com/pressdownloads/
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Dateline New Delhi: 05 February 2007
A unique gathering of global design experts meets in New Delhi, India, on 2, 3 March to consider solutions to the growing crisis concerning food and energy. The ninth edition of the celebrated Doors of Perception conference is on the theme ‘Juice’.
Doors of Perception’s director John Thackara said today: “global food systems are an extreme example of wasteful economic activities that represent the downside of globalisation.The transport, processing, packaging and distribution of food consumes ten times more energy than enters our bodies as nutrition. We have to fix this".
Continue reading "Doors 9 Press Release"
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
Bugged?
"Vines are guarded by pest sensors - sophisticated microphones backed up by powerful analytical software which can distinguish the species and even the gender of a visiting insect from the patern of its wing beats"
[This comes from a fascinating story and I'm just sorry the good folk at Accenture declined our invitation to come to Doors 9 to tell it. In fact, they didn't even even reply to our several emails. Perhaps the company's spam filter had not been calibrated to recognise Doors as a friendly bug...] Anyway, the story continues:
"Every small variation of heat, soil, sunlight, and moisture affects the grapes and the flavour. The 30 acre Pickberry Vineyard home to a large network of wireless sensors, installed in 2003 as a pilot project by Accenture Technology Labs. Over 100 sensors measure humidity, soil and ambient temperature, and moisture levels in soil and air.
"Vines are guarded by pest sensors (bugged?) - sophisticated microphones backed up by powerful analytical software which can distinguish the species and even the gender of a visiting insect from the patern of its wing beats.
"These sensors are connected wirelessly to 30 small computers called motes. 'Having access to all this data has taken some of the trial and error out of viticulture: things that would take them two or three years now take them two or three months', says Mr Khan."
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
High-rise honey
From Farming Magazine: "Urban flowers provide a surprising line of uniquely flavored honeys. Graves's bees work asters (supplying abundant nectar in the fall), locust, sumac and the August-blooming Chinese Scholar tree. A coveted mint-flavored honey from the Linden tree is a fast seller. Nectar from an inconspicuous Japanese plant, growing even in parking lot cracks, produces a dark, caramel candy like honey, which Graves considers one of his best. It is popular with his customers, as they love its unique taste. He claims healthy hives, and his honey production supports that. Two years ago, a record honey harvest yielded 140 pounds from one Upper West Side rooftop hive (unfortunately, the stolen hive), exceeding an average annual yield by 60 pounds".
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
Rainforest regeneration
One of the most depressing sections in George Monbiot's book Heat was about the dire impact on rainforest of the switch to biofuels. The European Union has made it a mandatory target that 20% of its fuel will be bio by (I think) 2010. This has created a vast market for biofuel crops that has in turn triggered bio crop growers to cut down vast swathes of forest.
On the plus side, a $350 million deal - the largest ever - has just been signed for the regeneration of 100,000 hectares of rainforest in Colombia. According to Gunther Pauli, who is behind the deal, "the project inaugurates a post-conflict era for Colombia with the creation of 12,000 jobs, and homes for 50,000 people. Over the next four years (2008 to 2011), the newly created venture, Marandua SA, will oversee the planting of an estimated 86 million trees".
The unique feature of the deal is that the Colombian Air force will relinquish the rights to two thirds of its military bases in the Vichada in order to allow the creation of this ecological and social development project. The planting of Caribbean pine, palm, rubber and cashew - all native species - will generate urgently needed food and jobs for the country.
More information (ask for the full press release): info@zeri.org
By John Thackara, Feb 2007 | Comments (0)
$13m for Polak project
No food without water. A Colorado organization that for 25 years has pioneered low-cost farming technology for villagers in poor parts of the world has been boosted by a $13 million grant from Bill Gates.The money for International Development Enterprises (IDE) will fund expanded projects in Ethiopia, Nepal, Myanmar and Zambia, said Paul Polak, IDE's president and founder. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation recognized IDE as "a leader in small-scale irrigation technology when a lot of people have ignored it," the foundation's senior program officer, Roy Steiner, said. The grant, confirmed Tuesday by Gates foundation officials, nearly doubles IDE's annual budget.The projects use IDE-engineered water pumps, pond liners, plastic tubes and other technology to help subsistence farmers irrigate small plots and earn at least $200 a year. That bit seems to be the key: IDE does not just give people money or equipment, it sets them up with an income stream. While other organizations supply low-cost technology for farmers, they often ignore the farmers themselves, IDE embraces listening to farmers in their work.
By John Thackara, Jan 2007 | Comments (0)
Frying tonight at Pret
So I was sitting in the Kings Cross branch of Pret A Manger drinking some miso soup. So far, so virtuous. But a grating pervasive noise disturbed my reverie. Right opposite me there was a row of open-fronted display cabinets. Heavy-duty chiller engines in their base were roaring away to ensure that the crayfish wraps and organic chicken sandwiches on the shelves above stayed cool and...fresh. Above the cabinets, ceiling-mounted heating units were also roaring away - warming up the cool air that escaped from the cabinets.
So I go the the Pret website, where a new Sustainability Statement outlines "a list of priorities and more importantly, what we’re doing about them". The list covers packaging, recycling, food waste - and energy use. Of the latter it says: "we now have a fleet of 11 electric vans to deliver our just made sandwich platters to our delivery customers".
I would guess that the display cabinets in a single branch of Pret - and they have 150 - use as much energy as all those vans. But let's be positive. Nicki Fisher, Pret’s Sustainability Manager, asks (on their website) that we call her on +44 20 7932 3385 with any suggestions. What, if you were in her position, what would you do?
Postscript: even candy wrappers are noisy. Eric M Kramer explains why in this paper.
By John Thackara, Jan 2007 | Comments (0)
Big Food: the good guys?
The madness of global food systems is for sure the work of global companies. But some former bad guys seem intent on doing good. The mission of the Sustainable Food Laboratory is to "accelerate the sustainable food trend from niche to mainstream so that we can ensure a healthy future for the planet and its people. We design and implement innovations that make global food systems more economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable — in other words, in balance with nature and good for both producer and consumer communities". The group contains seriously large companies and, to judge by its meeting last year in New Orleans, is thinking very seriously about system-wide innovation. The Lab is also associated with the Sustainable Agriculture Initiative Platform, centered in Europe, which has 22 members, and with Business for Social Responsibility, which has also convened a Food and Agriculture Working Group. Wal-Mart, as we have all heard, has convened value chain networks relevant to the food and agriculture sector. And a new Business Coalition for Sustainable Food is emerging in Brazil. We have not been abkle to persuade the Sustainable Food Laboratory to join us in Delhi for Doors 9, but we will be attennding their semi-annual meeting in London, 13-16 February, 2007.
By John Thackara, Jan 2007 | Comments (0)
Open source infra for food
If we are to re-localise food, a new generation of information systems will be needed as support. Many of today's food systems rely on closed networks in which access to information is controlled by entities (such as supermarkets) that are not keen on cooperatives and localisation. The good news is that open source software for food systems are already emerging. A story in Indymedia shows the People's Food Co-op in Portland, Cascadia, ringing out items on an entirely free open-source point-of-sale system (or POS) - the software needed to run a cash register and manage the pricing of all the items in a store.The story describes the project as a 'world's first', but several commenters list comparable systems that, they say, already exist. The "I was first! No, I was first!" bickering is tiresome, especially considering the vast amount of design work still to be done . We need, for example, to exploit the potential of RFID systems to give citizens far more information about about a product's history (where product = carrot) than might be comfortable for the the company selling it.
By John Thackara, Nov 2006 | Comments (0)
Lethally lit lunch
George Monbiot writes about food in his book Heat that food retailers waste insane amounts of energy. They use seven times more power (275 k Wh per cubic metre) to run a food hall than is used in an office. For the larger stores, up to a quarter of that energy budget goes on lighting - which is to make the food look good, not for it to be good. Most of the rest (64 per cent) is used for refrigeration, which is also ruinously wasteful. Think of all those open-fronted units: A single open-fronted freezer costs a retailer 15000 pounds (22,000 euros) per year to run in energy bills alone. Monbiot says we should replace out of town food retailing with warehouses that would service internet-enabled home delivery services. But even that sounds too transport-intensive if powered vehicles are to be involved. Bikes are the answer. Young lads seem happy to haul fat tourists around in rickshaws in London, so they (the lads) can retrained to do grocery runs, too.
By John Thackara, Oct 2006 | Comments (0)
Food information systems
Two days ago I was in London to talk with design school tutors about the design competition concerning food information systems that the Royal Society of Arts is running together with Dott07. Today I learned from CalorieLab via SmartMobs that McDonald’s is now placing codes on the packaging of many foods so that eaters can scan the package with their cell phones and find out the nutritional information. "Known as a QR Code, these printed codes look somewhat like a barcode and are scannable by many photo cellphones. All sorts of information can be packed into these little codes, from the website to find the amount of calories and fat in a Big Mac to a company’s contact information on a business card," the site explains. This is good news for any young designers seeking to win a trip to Doors 9 (the prize for winning the RSA competition): you don't have to invent a QR food application - McDonalds has done that: take that as your starting point and amaze us with how much further it could go.
By John Thackara, Sep 2006 | Comments (0)
Pigs and cubic cities
If humans can live in skyscrapers, why not pigs and fish? When the Dutch architect Winy Maas first proposed that 600 metre-high skyscrapers, filled with pigs, could supply most of Europe�s pork needs, he was accused of proposing �concentration camps for animals�. But why should agriculture be restricted to the countryside, and organised horizontally? Would it not be efficient, and ecologically sounder, to move food production and consumption closer together? This is one proposal in 1,400 page book called KM3 by MVRDV. (Winy Maas is the M).
KM3 asks two questions: How much built space would be required in a world supporting ten times more people than it does today - 65 billion? And, how would such a city be organised? Maas and colleagues designed a hypothetical city that accomodates one million people and all their needs in the most compact possible form. For the purposes of the exercise, their city is autarchic: It has no neighbours, and must meet all its needs internally. As design inputs, the team assembled an extraordinary list of spatial reguirements - from the amount of volume needed for food production (20 percent) to the average volume of a psychiatric hospital (446 square metres).
Although startling in scope, KM3 is an extrapolation of existing trends. Among familar urban areas designed to be highly dense are Les Halles and La Defence in Paris, the Barbican in London, and Bijlmermeer in Amsterdam. These examples do not inspire joy at the prospect of a KM3 future. The French sites, in particular, are so ghastly that they feature endlessly in dystopian gangster and science fiction movies. But for Maas, these contemporary examples are imperfect not because they are dense, but because they lack "programmatic diversity". They are monocultures. 3D cities will only work, Maas argues, if they contain a rich mix of acitivites: Not just work, or sleeping, but all forms of production, especially agricultural.
Hence the vertical pig cities scenario. What started as a design provocation has taken on a life of its own. Maas' proposal has fed into an emerging proposal for a total reshaping of agriculture - at least in man-made Holland. A Dutch think tank, the Innovation Network for Rural Areas and Agricultural Systems, proposes the transfer of agricultural production to industrial areas near large populations of people. KM3, Excursions On capacities. MVRDV, 2006. Actar, Barcelona
By John Thackara, Aug 2006 | Comments (0)
Fat, cities, and homeland insecurity
As I mentioned a while back, two geographers, Simon Marvin and Will Medd, have published a quease-inducing paper about fat in cities. In Metabolisms of Obecity: Fat across bodies, cities and sewers they write that the number of sewer blockages and overflows across cities in the United States is growing as restaurants and fast food chains pour cooking residue into drains. Local governments lack the resources to monitor grease disposal or to enforce the relevant regulations. Yuk.
I was intrigued to see that Marvin and Medd have invented something called Urban Vulnerability Studies to package - and presumably get funding for - this new line of work. This is clever: geography must sound boring to a homeland security (or whatever it's called in the UK) budget holder. But "urban vulnerability"? Ooh, that sounds serious. Better spend a ton of money on it.
Fat-clogged sewers are not the only threat facing modern cities. Hunger is another one. The British government appears to believe that growing food is an old-fashioned activity that is inconsistent with a shiny knowledge-based economy. Every where I go these days, local policymakers tell me with pride about some digital enterprise that has set up shop in the middle of a nearby field - often with a generous grant to help them do so. As a result, food security in the country as a whole is non-existent. Sixty million people will have a nasty surprise when systemic collapses in logistics systems, which are bound to happen, cut them off from anything to eat.
You can't eat game engines.
Doors 9, with its focus on energy and food, is crucial to the national and urban security of many places. We still need funding to the tune of .000001% of America's Homeland Security budget to pay for scholarships so that project leaders may come to New Delhi from different parts of India and elsewhere in South Asia. If you are able to fund a scholarship or two, please contact: john@doorsofperception.com
By John Thackara, Aug 2006 | Comments (0)
Noisy food
A couple of days ago I found myself in the town centre of Carlisle, in the north west of England, at 7am. The roads were empty except for a a large white truck whose driver was unloading packaged food into a shop. An incredible, raw-edged roar of noise came from the refrigeration unit on top of his cab. The noise was so extreme that my skin started to creep, and I couldn't hear a word when someone called me on my mobile phone. I retreated into the railway station cafeteria, but it was not much better in there: Two large refrigerated drinks machines were roaring away so loudly that the sales assistant had to shout to tell me the price of a coffee.
That noise represents wasted energy. The scary thing, as I learned at the Creative Rural Economy conference in Lancaster, is that perpetually rising food transport intensity is government policy. One policymaker described the countryside as "post productivist", and a senior academic advisor to the UK government told me later that "the purpose of the countryside is consumption".
I suppose this is factually correct - city dwellers make 1.2 billion trips to the countryside in the UK alone, and spend 12 billion pounds shopping when they get there; but it's a disastrous policy in environmental and food security terms.
It's also mad. One supermarket is flying planeloads of turnips from New Zealand to the UK in order to drive down the prices being asked by home growers. Turnips contain 70 percent water - so the company is in effect flying planeloads of water across the world to drive down prices of a root crop that could once have been found within a couple of miles of where most of the population lives.
I also learned that if you or I spend ten euros on a food in a supermarket, less than 60 cents - 6% - of that money goes to the farmer who grew it. The rest goes to the wholesalers, the processors, the packagers, the retailers - and to the running costs of that roaring white truck in Carlisle.
But lots of good things are happening too, as we are finding out in the City Farming strand of Dott.
By John Thackara, Aug 2006 | Comments (0)
Food as a design opportunity
Why "juice"?
(Most of the statistics that follow are taken from the miraculously useful and interesting website of Jean-Marc Jancovci)
Global food systems are becoming unsustainable in terms of environmental impact, health, and social quality. But what to do?
The U.S. food system consumes ten times more energy than it produces in food energy. This disparity is made possible by nonrenewable fossil fuel stocks.
127 calories of energy are used to grow and export one calorie of lettuce from the US to the UK.
In 'developed' countries, CO2 emissions attributed to producing, processing, packaging and distributing the food is about 8 tonnes a year for a family of four.
Agriculture and food now account for nearly 30 percent of goods transported on European roads.
95 percent of the fruit and half the vegetables eaten in the UK are imported.
There are 52 transport and process stages in one bottle of ketchup.
In France, 20 percent of money spent by citizens on food is devoted to raw products such as fruit, vegetables, or fresh meat of fish. The rest is used to buy processed food : pasta, canned food, frozen food, biscuits and sweets, drinks, etc.
These processing industries consume energy and therefore emit greenhouse gases.
Most processed foods are packaged. Manufacturing the packaging (steel, aluminium, plastics) accounts for 70- 80 percent of the overall emissions of the food industry.
Processed food is generally bought in supermarkets which consume electricity to keep foods frozen - especially in open display units.
Most supermarkets sell industrially-grown chickens. The lifecycle of such a bird entails:
- Emissions linked to the heating of the hen house;
- Fossil fuels used to manufacture the fertilizers used to grow the grain eaten by the chicken;
- Fossil fuels burnt by the tractor used to grow the grain eaten by the chicken;
- Nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions that occur when the fertilizers are spread on the field;
- Fossil fuels required to manufacture chicken food (industrial chickens rarely eat "raw" cereals, but rather processed foods) from the cereals;
- Emissions linked to the manufacturing of tractors, to the drying of grain, and to the refinery of the diesel oil used by the tractor....
Eating meat requires intensive agriculture because it is necessary to grow a lot of plants to feed the animals.
When decaying, nitrogenous fertilizers cause N2O emissions, 300 times more powerful than CO2.
Ruminants emit methane, which is 23 times more powerful than CO2, because of the fermentation of the plants they eat in their digestive sysem.
Producing an unprocessed kilogramme (2.2 pounds) of beef (with bones) leads to the emission of three to four kilogrammes (nearly nine pounds) of carbon equivalent.
Between 65 and 70 percent of the available agricultural land in France is devoted to feeding animals.
Fruits and vegetables (except for potatoes and vineyards) acount for two percent of the total.
The amount of meat consumed by an inhabitant of the Earth has increased by 60 percent over the last 40 years while the world population has doubled. Meat production has been multiplied by 3.2
Every cow in the European Union is subsidised by $2.50 a day.
One in five people in the world lives on less than $1 a day.
The US insists that 50 percent of its food aid is processed or bagged.
Poor diet and physical inactivity account for 35 percent (and rising) of avoidable causes of deaths in the US.
People in industrialised countries eat between six and seven kilogrammes (about 15 pounds) of food additives every year.
Supermarkets are heated in the winter and cooled in the summer. Heating and cooling stores represents, in France, between 1,5 and 2 million tonnes carbon equivalent carbon.
Supermarkets are usually located in suburbs – so we use cars to get there. In the UK, 25 percent of car journeys are to get food.
In the home, our use of processed foods causes us to use more energy in fridges and freezers, stoves ovens, microwaves.
In France, the electricity consumption linked to eating (fridges, freezers, dish-washers, stoves and ovens, not to mention small appliances) represents 22 percent of all energy consumed at home,
25 percent of domestic waste is composed of food waste which, when landfilled, leads to methane emissions.
Is that all mad, or what?
That is why Doors 9 is about food and energy.
By John Thackara, Jul 2006 | Comments (0)
Alternatives to Geldofism: lecture notes and resources
I gave a lecture at the Royal Society of Arts in London entitled "Solidarity economics & design". The lecture was provoked by the sick-making antics of Bob Geldof and the assumptions he and others made about 'development'. I argued that the word 'development' implies that we advanced people in the North have the right, or even obligation, to help backward people in the South to ‘catch up' with our own advanced condition. And that No, this idea doesn't make sense. The concept of development is further devalued, I said, by the impoverished but destructive mindset of economics. "The North's purse strings are clutched by people who define development narrowly in terms of growth, jobs and productivity - and ignore broader measures of sustainability and well-being". Anyway, I prepared rather thorough (for me) lecture notes and a list of resources - and then forgot to put them online. So here they are now.
By John Thackara, Jun 2006 | Comments (0)
Food that heats us up
Food miles in the UK have risen dramatically over the past 10 years, are still rising, and have a significant impact on climate change, traffic congestion, accidents and pollution according to a report published yesterday, and reported in The Guardian. Food transport accounts for 25% of all the miles driven by heavy goods vehicles on British roads. The use of heavy trucks to transport food has doubled since 1974 (in southern Europe, it's growing even faster). The dramatic increase has resulted in a rise in the amount of CO2 emitted by food transport: 19m tonnes of carbon dioxide were emitted in the UK 2002 in the course of getting food to people, a 12% increase on 1992, the report says. Airfreight, the most polluting form of food transport, is growing fastest. Tim Lang, (one of the world's leading critics of industrialised food systems, and author of Food Wars ) is quoted as saying: "If the government doesn't take action to tackle this, all its proposals on climate change will be so much nonsense." A minister called Lord Bach, who launched the report in London, promised that the British government would "work with the industry to achieve a 20% reduction in the environmental and social costs of food transport by 2012". The words 'breath', 'hold', 'your', and 'don't' spring to mind: no British government is going to take meaningful action against an industry that combines food, logistics, massively powerful retailers, and spoiled consumers. We'll have to wait for a couple of massive eco-shocks before the policy framework will change. In the meantime, there's a lot of interesting service design to be done in support of the massive move towards sustainable food systems that is already underway.
By John Thackara, Jan 2006 | Comments (0)
Rural design
What are the key design tasks facing the new post-agricultural rural economies and settlements? A conference in the UK in September will map out a new role for the arts and design in response to new social, environmental and economic regeneration priorities. Among the strands and seminar topics currently being developed are:
- Arts and agri-tourism, artists projects in B+Bs, farm barns and cattle marts
- New rural media, digital art, design and the new rural knowledge economy
- Rural arts and design festivals, rural performing arts and touring projects
- Rural community broadcasting, convergence and cultural applications of ICT
- New urban-rural business partnerships, and arts-led rural cultural diversity
- Future farms, art-farms, rural art workshops and agri-design industry clusters
- Rural Biennales, proposal for a European Region of Rural Culture & Design
- Designing the new rural settlements; rural housing and architectural initiatives
- Investing in rural community-led design, crafts and arts as cultural capital
- Designing alternative land uses, renewables and new energy & fibre crops
- Food as cultural economy, urban agriculture and urban-rural foods initiatives
- Contemporary rural, innovative crafts and design-led rural regeneration
- Rural textile/fashion design and smart clothing interfaces with agriculture.
The conference was developed by the Rural Cultural Forum, Arts Council England, LEADER+ UK, Culture NW, LITTORAL Arts, and the Lancashire Economic Partnership.
By John Thackara, Jan 2006 | Comments (0)
How fast is fast food?
"Quick-serve restaurants are having a tough time keeping the fast in fast food, as menus become more complicated. At San Diego-based Jack in the Box restaurants, for instance, it takes an average of 228.9 seconds – 3.8 minutes – to get burgers out the drive-through window after an order is taken". This startling information comes from a new study by the trade magazine QSR which rates burger, chicken and taco chains. QSR analysts estimate that speeding up delivery by as little as six seconds can improve sales by 1 percent or more. That's because about 70 percent of all fast-food transactions occur at the drive-through window, and the busiest two hours at most restaurants are during lunch. To enhance (and enforce) efficiency, "many chains use digital timing systems, software and headsets to keep the packages of onion rings emerging with lock-step predictability", the report says. "Indeed, some chains can monitor individual stores instantly from their headquarters to make sure the clock isn't ticking too long on each order". Who said the command-and-control economy was over? That last charming add-on probably came from Wharton Business School, whose banner ad features prominently on the QSR site.
By John Thackara, Nov 2005 | Comments (0)
Hungry and lonely
Is the collective intelligence of the web overrated? A couple of nights ago, 18 people turned up for dinner. We pushed three tables together and sat together around an irregular rectangle. It felt, to me at least, as if the shape and dimensions of the ad-hoc table did little to foster social interaction. So yesterday I spent two hours failing to find a website that would tell me the the optimal shape and size of a dining table for 12-18 people. Googling design + table + size + social first yielded TableTop2006. This interaction design workshop in Australia is all about Horizontal Interactive Human-Computer Systems; the website mentions augmented reality, user interface technologies, multi-modal interactions, computer supported collaborative work, and information visualisation - but it makes no mention of food. A description of dining tables in the Roman Empire proved diverting, but did not answer my boring questions about size and shape. The nearest I got was Guidelines For Choosing The Size And Shape Of Dining Tables. But that text-only site contains no drawings or room layouts - and I would have to import the author, a cabinetmaker (also, curiously, from Australia) to benefit from his tacit knowledge. Surely someone can do better? The answer seems to be oval - but what sort of oval?
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By John Thackara, Oct 2005 | Comments (0)
