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
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The workshop at the School of Architecture of the University of Alcalá offered place for a free and collaborative research, to detect and analyse local and compatible resources, both social as technological and material ones, to generate tools, knowledge and places and to test new practices and new citizen initiatives.
The result was two trolleys that function as an open-air mobile kitchen for shared school spaces where you can test prototypes of minimal energy consumption.
The ephimeral exhibition It is carried out with the students of the University of Alcalá in the public places near the university (Plaza Cervantes etc) as an activity to show the built mobile kitchen. The kitchen is transported from the center and is installed as ephemeral exhibition where the explanation of the systems is performed for the assistant public.
In relation to the self-sufficiency of the school itself, it is proposed the construction of a simple system that allows students to produce their own food, as a start test of food self-sufficiency. For this purpose, an innovative design of germinators is built. The germinator is made from glass jars and reused pots.
The solar cooker is smaller than the one that can be used to store the solar energy. It was constructed on a 30-60 model, from the design made by Jose M. Jiménez «El Super».
Pezestudio is a creative cell of architects that created in 2006 that develops projects of Urbanism, Architecture, Design and Action-Research.
We design objects, tools, spaces and practices that promote minimum human impact on the environment, social development, research and production of innovative construction techniques and the generation of collaborative contexts.
We work around concepts such as ecology and society, rural and urban habitats and lifestyles, tradition and technology, reuse and standardization, crafts and do it yourself / do it together, Open source and participation.
We explore and rehearse the possibilities of architecture, design and urbanism as tools for development and social change.