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 
The kitchen is the place where everything can happen, the place where one meets when returning in the evening, the place of the most fiery discussions, the place where one disputes the last part Cake and the way to cut the onions, the small corner of table to do his homework and the workshop of clay …
The kitchen is the nerve centre of the private space.
To transpose this space in the public square is to question the limits … or the thickness of these limits.
Enter home and at home,
Between me and the street,
Between the development of a space and the life that takes place there,
Between what we are allowed to imagine on the public space and the potential of life that it constitutes, between what one sees when one passes and what can happen when one stops …
The public kitchen was the occasion for multiple encounters on Saturday, where Lucien tasted a paté of lentils and played small cars, while others hung their drawings on the fridge, prepared the mint tea, crushed the chickpeas , Discussed the recipe for couscous, the temperature of the oven to make the best cookies … or passed, but more slowly, looking at this large table with an inquiring eye.
And if public space was not only the place of displacement …?
Architects, landscapers, visual artists, builders, graphic designers, since 2007 Saprophytes have been developing artistic and political projects around social, economic and ecological concerns.
We claim a relational aesthetic that emphasises social experience as a founding artistic and constructive act. For Les Saprophytes, the collective manufacturing process of the project is as important as its finished form. Seeking the specificities and potentials of each place, our projects of micro-urbanism, concrete urbanism are squeezed between the scales of territory and are expressed through different types of actions.