The upcoming Centre for Research in European Architecture (CREAte) Open Lecture will be given by Carolyn Steel with her talk titled, ‘Food and Cities: Sitopia – How Food Can Save the World’ on Tuesday 3 November at 18.00. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, all open lectures will take place via Microsoft Teams. Please use this link to join the open lecture.
Carolyn Steel writes, ‘Food is our most vital shared commodity, inextricably woven into the social and spatial structures of our lives. The way we produce, trade, consume and waste food influences everything from our bodies, habits, politics and economies to our cities, landscapes and climate. We live in a world shaped by food – a place I call ‘sitopia’ (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place). Yet, by failing to value food, we have created a way of life that threatens us and our planet. Climate change, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, pollution, mass extinction, diet-related disease and the current pandemic are just some of the side-effects of the way we eat. Yet, by restoring food’s true value and harnessing its power to shape our lives, we can not only reverse these ills, but learn how to flourish on our crowded, overheating planet.’
Carolyn Steel MA (Cantab) RIBA, is a leading thinker on food and cities. An award-winning author, architect and academic, she is the author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2008) and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2020). Her concept of sitopia, or food-place, has gained international recognition across a broad range of fields in design, ecology, academia and the arts. A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects in London, Carolyn studied at Cambridge University and has subsequently taught at Cambridge, London Metropolitan and Wageningen Universities as well as the London School of Economics. Carolyn is in international demand as a speaker and her 2009 TED talk has received more than one million views. She is currently a research fellow with Aeres University in the Netherlands and in August 2020 she was featured in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme.
All welcome!