Session 7 / London Live Program: Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World
Carolyn Steel
Author of Hungry City and Sitopia
Kilburn Nightingale Architects, London
How will we live in the future? More specifically, how can we hope to thrive on our overcrowded, overheating, planet? By 2050, 80 percent of us are expected to be living in cities. But what will those cities look like, and what effect will they have on their productive hinterlands, and the natural world in which both sit? The current pandemic has thrown such questions into high relief, raising fundamental issues concerning our relationship with nature, the urban-rural partnership and our very idea of a good life. And at the center of all these questions is one that often gets overlooked: that of how we are going to eat.
Living in a modern city like London or Chicago, it can be hard to see how fundamentally food shapes our lives. Industrialization has obscured the vital links without which no city could survive: those connecting it to the countryside. 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 called ‘sitopia’ (from the Greek sitos, food + topos, place). By failing to value food, we have created a way of life that now 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 ‘externalities’ of the way we eat. But by restoring food’s value and harnessing its power for good, we can not only reverse these ills, but rebalance our relationship with nature and so learn how to flourish in a low-carbon future.