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 
We proposed to install 10 banquet tables in the public space during an ecologic festival. These tables are questioning the roles and uses of urban public space and arise as an artistic element linked to relational aesthetics. They settle in 10 districts of Lille, offering a network of meeting space, conducive to an inaugural wandering.
The artistic challenge lies around tables. It is a proposition of relational aesthetics. How will people react to the intrusion of large tables? Will they profit to meet, eat, drink? Or just read a book, watch passers-by who pass by, talk to their neighbour? For the inauguration we walked from table to table with music and good dishes to share.
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 are squeezed between the scales of territory and are expressed through different types of actions.