How Food Shapes Our Cities

In this video, Carolyn Steel explores the unbreakable connection between food and cities and explains why that connection is endangered by modern food production and distribution methods. Steel is the author of “Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives,” and is a well-known lecturer on the connection between food and urban design. She developed the concept of the sitopia, an alternative to the unsustainable modern food distribution system.

Food is at the center of human existence. It means far more than simply physical sustenance. If you doubt it, try to imagine a Thanksgiving celebration without a meal or a Fourth of July without the aromas from a dozen grills and BBQ smokers coming from around your neighborhood. Steel points out that food forms the heart of cities, as well.

In order to feed a city, food must be grown, transported, sold and prepared. Today, this process is often unseen, but it binds 21st-century humans as tightly to the land as it did their ancestors. Ten thousand years ago, the first cities were made possible by the new technology of agriculture. For nearly all of the years since, the shape, size and location of cities was controlled by the availability of food.

Today, modern transportation allows cities to spring up anywhere. Food no longer walks or floats into cities or is harvested in the morning and sold in open-air markets in the afternoon. According to Steel, this has disrupted the essential relationship between humans and nature and forced city-dwellers into dependency upon a handful of multinational corporations that control 80 percent of the world’s food trade.

Steel’s solution, the sitopia, would reconnect city-dwellers to the land by bringing food production back into the city through the use of urban gardens and the re-establishment of farmers markets and fish, meat and poultry markets. According to Steel, just as in the earliest cities, if the city supports the country, the country will support the city.

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