Doctoral Candidate Fodor Kata

Kitchen Think-Over: The Hybridisation of Food Spaces and their Potential to Facilitate Sustainable Diets

Tieteellinen tutkimus / siihen pohjautuva työ | Kaksivuotinen

The project examines what the spatial implications/preconditions are of facilitating ‘Sustainable Diets’ in affluent Western cities. With particular regards to demographic changes, technological developments and environmental challenges, it considers how our latest food-systems-knowledge can be embedded into spatial design, as a research-based and multidisciplinary form of creative practice. The spatial design fields - concerned with accommodating our rapidly urbanising world - have yet to sufficiently address how any desirable shifts in urban food practices can be spatially facilitated. With the exception of urban farming, the spatial implications of sustainable urban food logistics, retail, food preparation and waste management are far from being well understood. Yet, given how significantly spatial logics - on all scales from the layout of one’s kitchen up to larger urban configurations - dictate people’s behaviours and implicitly define what is convenient to do on a societal level, these questions are all the more urgent. Considering these issues in the context of affluent Western cities, I ask how their spatial development and models of affordable housing could facilitate positive changes in their food practices - what the design implications would be for housing developments, what design traditions/conventions we should abandon, and where we need to invent new solutions. More broadly, how our future urban food spaces could simultaneously respond to demographic changes, technological developments and environmental concerns. My research approaches these questions in two ways: Through the study of contemporary food practices in - the increasingly dominant demographic of - non-familial households. And second, through the observation of an ongoing urban phenomenon, which I propose to call the ‘the hybridisation of food spaces’ – that is, a tendency of diversifying their functional programmes physically while also merging their operations with virtual platforms.