Edible Futures, Keynote Address

A two-day public symposium in Knowlton Hall investigating the intersectional and entangled nature of food futures with environmental and social issues.

Keynote

CJ Lim
The Bartlett School of Architecture
Food City

“Food City: The urban consequences of food transparency”
There has been an undeniable symbiosis between urbanization and agricultural development. Food is no less important to the city now as it was centuries ago, yet its presence with the advent of industrial and post-industrial economies has been relegated to the hinterlands, physically and ideologically. ‘Food City’ reassesses the relationship in an era of unrelenting urbanism and chronic global food shortage, two interdependent phenomena that must reach a conciliation to prevent an impending catastrophe that is human as much as environmental. Food equality must be at the core of national and local governance – it can be a driver to restructure employment, education, transport, health, culture, communities, and the justice system, re-evaluating how the city functions as a spatial and political entity. The urban investigations of food poetics and transparency combine nostalgia and futurism in a narrative architecture ‘The Food Parliament’, a fantastical provocation intended to raise serious questions over our everyday priorities.

CJ Lim is Professor of Architecture and Urbanism at the Bartlett, UCL. His research and teachings of ‘smartcities’ focus on multi-disciplinary interpretations of social, political, and climate change-related urban designs that address the fundamental human requirements to protect, to provide and to participate. He is the recipient of the Royal Academy of Arts London Grand Architecture Prize. He has authored 12 books including Virtually Venice (2006), Short Stories – London in two-and-a-half dimensions (2011), Food City (2014) and Inhabitable Infrastructures: Science fiction or urban future? (2017), and Smartcities, Resilient Landscapes and Eco-warriors (2019). His latest authored book Once Upon a China (2020) continues his interest in architectural storytelling.