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
If you prefer to print any content as single PDFs, you can just click
For the collective Kitchen we propose an urban intervention Squares, parks, and other public spaces. With a mobile kitchen structure, equipped with water tanks and sinks, a wood fired oven and cooker, big tables, benches, some of our Multi Beach Chairs, drinking water.
Everybody is invited to bring along something, be it a piece of food or just the desire to eat, to collectively share our recipes, experiments with flavours and smells. Through this alchemy we created a sense of community. Our Collective Kitchen occupy the public space as an invitation to all of us to further claim the use of what is ours.
OPAVIVARÁ! is an art collective from Rio de Janeiro, which develops actions in public spaces of the city, galleries and cultural institutions, proposing inversions in the use of urban space, through the creation of relational devices that provide collective experiences. Since its creation in 2005, the group has been actively participating in the Brazilian contemporary art scene.