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 
‘Mantel Urbano para un pic-nic vecinal’ was framed inside the Festival de Cultura en la Calle of Rivas-VaciaMadrid. Basurama proposed a public art piece, a popular action. An open call was launched for all the neighbours of Rivas to build a great urban tablecloth to set a neighbourhood picnic.
All the citizens form Rivas were invited to bring their own tablecloth and food to the vacant plot next to ‘La Casa+ Grande’. There was a double aim: On one hand, inhabit the vacant plots, reclaim for the celebration those places where everything is possible, because there is nothing done, small patches of the countryside inside the city. On the other hand, every person, family and group of friends that arrived was photographed with their tablecloth as a photocall and then they moved to the vacant plot where the sew their tablecloth together with the ones from other participants. In this way, they weaved not only their clothes but also conversations while sharing croquetas, french fries and patties.
Basurama is an artist collective dedicated to research, cultural and environmental creation and production established in Madrid in 2001, whose practice revolves around the reflection of trash, waste and reuse in all its formats and possible meanings. We find gaps in contemporary processes of production and consumption that not only raise questions about the way we manage our resources but also about the way we think, we work, we perceive reality. Basurama acts like a creative linking platform where different agents of the same social network come together. It has created more than 100 projects in the four continents.