engleski

Fed (Up): A Prototype for an Equitable Food Management and Distribution Center

The paper elaborates on an architectural prototype for an equitable Food Management and Distribution Center, exploring ways of reimagining urban food networks in order to rationalize and improve the flow of food through the contemporary metropolis. This is motivated by the grim statistic of a third of all the food produced globally being thrown away every year – resulting in massive greenhouse gas emissions – in parallel with millions of people living below the poverty line, hungry. With tangible reflections of this paradox present across cities and urban areas worldwide, addressing the issue of food waste ceases to elude the architects’ domain: our cities are fed badly, and we should be fed up with that. Heavily relying on a research-by-design methodology, the prototype for the Food Management and Distribution Center is envisioned as a system, a spatial framework comprising numerous elements of urban food infrastructure, as well as public and communal spaces. A high-intensity coupling of programs that are typically planned in different, often peripheral, areas of the city challenges monofunctional zoning practices and questions our spatial priorities. The prototype for the Center is examined in detail, by analyzing its spatial logic and elements, location requirements, as well as key economic, energetic, ecological, and social aspects. The exact anatomy of the Center is always generated anew according to specific, contextual location parameters and program needs, but its possible functions can be clearly defined. With a food bank that accepts both industry and citizen donations functioning as the core of the system, the resulting hybrid complex also comprises hydroponics greenhouses, communal gardens, kitchens, a drivein restaurant, a student canteen, a soup kitchen, a marketplace, multifunctional event spaces, rainwater collectors and anaerobic digesters. Rather than the conventional design of objects, emphasis is put on designing relationships and processes: the human and non-human trajectories and flows of food, people, water, waste, animals, vehicles, energy, and money through the complex. Throughout the proposed system, excess food may be transported, donated, processed, cooked, traded, otherwise disseminated, or decomposed. As byproducts of those processes, the system may also generate and redistribute additional food, energy, and money, confronting and exploring the role of productive landscapes in contemporary cities. In this sense, the key questions are: what is being produced, and for whom? Contextual parameters of the system are further explored by theoretically testing the prototype on a chosen site in Zagreb, Croatia, bringing the metabolic elements of the system into a dialogue with specific social and communal needs.

productive landscape ; food waste ; hybrid system ; food bank ; prototype

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