Have you ever enjoyed a meal together with friends and strangers alike?
Can you imagine a square hosting a big table that neighbours share for dinner in summer nights?
Is it possible to raise awareness and fight food waste by launching a public banquet prepared out of leftovers?
In recent years numerous initiatives worldwide have arisen using food to challenge the way people engage in urban public spaces. Combining various backgrounds such as art, architecture, activism or anthropology, this interventions have been put into practice without any commercial purpose but holding multiple intentions that range from enjoyment and celebration to education or political protest.
City Cook Book is a collection of initiatives enhancing public spaces by bringing people together through food culture. It aims to explore how food can be an effective tool to both transform our common spaces into sites for encounter and social interaction, as well as to engage with larger issues that shape our everyday urban life. Through its digital platform and its print-it-yourself publication, City Cook Book intents to visualize this phenomena, reflect upon it and inspire other initiatives.
contact[at]citycookbook.org
City Cook Book is a non-profit initiative developed by Claudia Sánchez and Íñigo Cornago.
This web and publication has been designed by ereslomastumas and programmed by Andrés Sedano.
Proyecto financiado por Ayudas Creación Injuve
Project funded by Ayudas Creación Injuve
in each project or by choosing it from the following list.If you prefer to print any content as single PDFs, you can just click 
La cuisine des Fougères is a mobile kitchen made in 2014 by Bellastock for Khiasma, a French NGO based in Paris and Les Lilas which works on artistic and cultural mediation. It was designed and built by Charlotte Thon, Marc Boinet, Gregory Joye, with the participation of the screen printer Philippe Barbou and the bicycle repair NGO Cyclofficine.
The purpose of this project was to build an object which could get appropriated by the inhabitants of the Fougères neighbourhood and become support for new urban interactions.
This mobile kitchen was built in Bellastock’s Actlab workshop with reused materials. The assembly of its different parts and the finishing touches were done with the inhabitants in the public space in front of the Maison des Fougères. For the cooking part it uses a wood stove based on a “pocket rocket stove” model which optimises the combustion, reducing the carbon emission and using little wood. Two tables unfold and multiply the usable space, a removable roof comes and protects the main work plan. The fireproof tarp was screen printed on the inauguration day with food theme drawings made by children of the neighbourhood.
Created in 2006 within the architecture school of Belleville (Paris), Bellastock is firstly a research platform whose activity relies essentially on the organization of an annual festival, reuniting hundreds of architecture students. Throughout the years, Bellastock has diversified its activity by multiplying its partners with schools, enterprises, local authorities and with all actors concerned within city and territory planning projects.
Bellastock’s activity is deliberately turned towards the establishment of original, ecological and economic alternatives to the act of building. Those stakeholders from complementary disciplines gather their knowledge and know-how to support architectural project and territory transformation.