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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Starting point was a former graveyard in Lichtenberg. The overgrown site was declared as a park, but still some ruins of the graveyard architecture remain. We decided to work with these elements and to add a new meaning to the place in order to foster its potentials.
The savaged vegetation inspired us and we discovered wild herbs: dandelion, blackberries, gout-weed, nettles and many more. The idea came up to transform the former graveyard into a wild herbs garden to enable a new way of reading the urban space. The former water basins were transformed into raised herbs beds. In cooperation with the local gardener school we did a one day workshop and cleaned, filled and planted 3 of the 4 remained basins. The fourth basin was transformed into a water reservoir. In addition to the intervention we designed a brochure which informs about the wild herbs and contains a collection of recipes. It can be found at different locations in the district for free. To present and promote the project we invited residents, gardeners, friends and supporters. They were the first to taste various appetiser made out of Gottesacker wild herbs. The plants are constantly growing and free to harvest.
We are an international collective of architects and focus our work on the forgotten and unused resources of our cities. The name «Guerilla Architects“ evolved through a squatting experience in London in 2012. Questioning the socio-economical structures of the cities and the role and responsibility of architecture connects our group until today. We focus on unconventional subversive transformations of public spaces. We are a collective of makers, theorists and planners who range in between the fields of urban planning, built and temporary architectures, art, cultural history and theatre. We come from Germany, Italy and Bulgaria and are based in Berlin, Göttingen, Sofia, and London.
Guerilla Architects are Anja Fritz, Silvia Gioberti, Tobias Hattendorff, Denica Indzova, Henriette Lütcke, Nike Kraft, Benedikt Stoll, Lucie Waschke, Sophie Fetten and Eric Zapel.