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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«Made in Vitrolles» was a cultural and urban project, belonging to a global strategy at the scale of the whole city during the European Culture Capital of «Marseille-Provence 2013». One of its aims was to change the image of the city by transforming public space and involving inhabitants and technical municipal departments.
«Made in Vitrolles» was targeting at building a long term transformation process, made of short term urban tactics in order to create collective appropriation and also create progressively a real convivial central area in the city. First, we occupied the main square «Place de Provence», and then we implemented different dynamics in other public spaces around.
We shared this project with 3 other french collectives: Exyzt, Bellastock and Saprophytes. In front of the bus station, at the entrance of the «Centre Urbain», we made a wooden carousel revealing different urban surroundings. It was also a comfortable place to be while waiting for the bus.
EXYZT is a platform for multidisciplinary creation whose aim is to challenge the view of architecture as an independent field of practice. They embark on experimental living ventures built collectively.
Saprophytes are architects, landscapers, visual artists, builders, graphic designers that develop artistic and political projects around social, economic and ecological concerns.
Bellastock is firstly a research platform whose activity relies essentially on the organisation of an annual festival, reuniting hundreds of architecture students.
Collectif Etc aims to bring together energies around a common dynamic of questioning the urban space through various mediums and different skills.