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 
«Occupied fields» is a research project about the abandoned Fano-Urbino railway (Italy). The project was developed during the course of «Communication and Design for Publishing», teached by the design collective Abake, at the ISIA Urbino. The project aims to promote a reflection on the usefulness of the space around the tracks and its conversion to new possible uses.
The context analysis has demonstrated the habit of residents to keep clean the ground around the tracks and use it as vegetable garden, but without any concessions. This is why the project questions the meaning of the concepts of common good and property, and the concept of boundary between private and public space.
The most operational phase was the creation of a convivial event, a useful time for meeting, sharing and reflection on personal perception of space. During the collective lunch each participant had food from private gardens (cultivated products), to which he could associate spontaneous plant preparations, picked up in public space.
The working group set up at the University for the specific project. We are young designers who share the interest in site specific projects, which promote reflection on the concepts of identity and territory, and which aim at engaging a particular community.