7. Sitopia
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Chapter Seven is about the future, and asks how we can use food as a tool for re-thinking cities and the way we live in them. The chapter’s title – sitopia – is a made-up word, from the Greek sitos, meaning food, and topos, place. So it means ‘food-place’, as opposed to utopia (‘good place’, or ‘no place’) a term used since Plato to describe an ideal – and therefore unattainable – community. Utopianism is the nearest thing we have to a cross-disciplinary tradition of thought about the problem of dwelling. The trouble is that it’s not a realistic approach, because it aims at perfection. That’s why I’m proposing sitopia as a practical alternative. The world is already shaped by food, so we may as well start using food to shape the world more positively.
If you look back at urban history, you realise that the dilemmas we face today are nothing new. Their scale may be unprecedented, but people have been puzzling over the question of how to build equable, workable, sustainable communities for about as long as cities have existed. I believe food is the key to thinking about these issues – the obvious answer that has been staring at us all along, only it was too big to see.
Food is what connects us all to each other and to the natural world, which makes it an incredibly powerful medium for thinking and acting collaboratively. It encompasses all of life – not just what is necessary, but also what makes live worth living. I can’t think of a more powerful or positive global revolution than one in which we all learned to see the world through food, and I hope that reading Hungry City will help you start doing just that.
December 8th, 2009 at 3:09 pm
I enjoyed your presentation in Groningen yesterday (7 th Dec 2009) very much. The broad and long-term perspective you used was quite inspiring.
Your book would be a great selection for a book review programme on Dutch television by VPRO, if it weren’t in English, because your views are an eyeopener in many respects. Even better would if a documentary could be made of your book’s subject by BBC or Dutch VPRO television.
I hope that you had the opportunity to see a 3D animation of the city of Groningen in the year 1497 in the Museum for Shipping history (Scheepvaartmuseum). It illustrates the city situated at a river and shows farmhouses within the city walls. So far, so good.
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