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 
In the new neighbourhoods recently built or planned in european cities, there is an aim to create a new piece of the city just by reproducing its image and following the market economy. However, this process has very little to do with the dynamics that have been building the city over the years. By performing direct interventions in uncoded and rarely used public spaces of these new areas, cocook project is trying to define how they work, research their potential, learn something from them and exchange experiences with their neighbours.
Cocook is a project on collaborative urban cooking that works in three levels:
> The cocook events, urban meals in which participants cook and eat together
> The collective design and construction of urban kitchen prototypes
> The exchange of culinary and constructive knowledge and its documentation
The event is considered on the same level as the space. We understand that cooking and producing furniture can follow the same logic. Therefore we propose to develop both in a relational and amateur public space characterised by collaboration and experimentation, opposite to the kitchen and the workshop space that usually operates in private or professional atmospheres. The urban kitchen prototypes depend on the material that is found, borrowed or donated as well as on the profile and knowledge of the collaborators . In the same way, the meal collaboratively cooked varies according to the ingredients, the participants and the kitchen prototype themselves. The same analogy applies to the documents used to communicate both levels: The recipe and the DIY kit, from which is possible to extract partial units in order to recombinate in different contexts.
Cocook has been developed from 2011 through uncoded public spaces of Stockholm, Barcelona, Dublin and Madrid thanks to the collaboration and participation of very diverse citizens and institutions.
Cornago&Sanchez is a Madrid based practice operating within the fields of art, architecture, landscape, urbanism and design. We approach our work focusing in the relationships and dynamics between the users and their environment in order to increase self-organisation, self-awareness and citizen empowerment.