Food and Cities

Architect Carolyn Steel gave a talk at TEDGlobal in July 2009 on “How food shapes our cities.” It’s just 15 minutes long; barely enough time to explain that our cities were once formed around our relationship to the food supply, but that relationship has been disrupted. And that we need to get it back.

Steel is also the author of a book, Hungry City, which covers this topic in-depth. It’s not available from our local library, so I’m waiting for an inter-library loan. Her talk also caused me to add Thomas More’s Utopia to my “to-read” list on Goodreads, as I haven’t read it!

I’m most interested in Steel’s idea of “sitopia.” She describes this briefly near the end of her talk. It’s a made-up word; a hybrid of the Greek sitos, which means food, and topos, which means place. Steel sees centering the life of a community around food as the key to restoring a sustainable relationship with food.  I look forward to reading more about this.