Edible New York

Edible New York is a food manifesto presented at Tallinn Architecture Biennale, 2022, Edible; Or, The Architecture of Metabolism. Part of the Future Food Deal, a curatorial initiative that urges architects and designers to reimagine planetary food systems, along with architecture’s expressive capacity to metabolize, digest and generate resources. In the exhibition, it becomes an open library that is comprised of manuals, cookbooks, visionary drawings, and manifestos. This piece was inspired by the following questions: What is the future of food systems and urbanity? What will it be in 2050? Invited participants were posed these questions and related issues, including food justice, species interdependencies, global political alliances, and/or obsolete infrastructures. Such exploration was encouraged through visualizations and expression of power dynamics—who gets to benefit from ecological catastrophe, who does not, and what would it look like?

Edible New York: Manifesto

Our precarious futures, we know, rely on food. Climate crisis gnaws at once was productive ground with drought, fire, floods, and rising tides. What foods will we lose? What creatures will go extinct? Our ecosystems are shifting beneath our feet, and our food webs are fraying. Set aside the loss for a moment. With food, we can nourish, we can care, and perhaps even find joy, something sublime. We find ourselves and each other across the table. We don’t know what we will lose in the days ahead, but we know there must be food. 

Our food futures are slow, sustainable, and perhaps most of all, sumptuous. We want to gather ripe fruits from the trees in our city. Bursting and dripping red and pink and yellow on the sidewalks below. We want to have block parties with our neighbors where we share recipes for paw paw cake and talk about how our grandmothers grew herb gardens in their backyards, and we can too. Here is a small packet from the local seed bank.  

We live in a city surrounded by water, a bay once filled with oysters and dolphins and whales, mostly gone now because of, what else, extractive practices. We want the gray waters to be blue again. We imagine floating farms, giant lily pad gardens, a coming together of land and sea. A shoreline that is resilient not from necessity but of our collective intentionality.  

We don’t want to disrupt, at least not in the sense of moving fast and breaking things. We want to design with, live with, love with, cohabitate, cooperate, and coevolve. We are all companions here. Or as Rosi Braidotti says, we are not entities, but ecologies. We are inspired by root systems that share and protect. We embrace decomposition and we design for degrowth.   

We imagine city nights alive with the sounds of creatures crawling, flying, digging, and eating in our green spaces. Speaking of green spaces, they are all over our city. We don't think of nature as “out there.” It’s right here on top of our skyscrapers, wedged between our streets, in our tiny brownstone backyards, and fire escape gardens. Built-in, imagined from the start, and included in all our urban plans.   

We aren’t opposed to technology. Collecting climate data, tracking migrations, alerting for toxic soil–making the invisible visible–these things matter to us too. But all that collection isn’t neutral. It has material consequences. We don’t want a landscape littered with data warehouses, but we see possibilities in biomaterials. We see new worlds in what is biodegradable. Besides, a cardboard tube in a mason bee house is technology too.   

What is edible sustains us, but we must ask what worlds are being sustained? Who is included and who is excluded in our designs? It goes beyond participation and access, it is a systematic shift that we envision–one that accounts in equal measure for people, plants, animals, objects–and what else? We don't always find the categories useful, though words are a starting point and a way of connecting. We want the city and its inhabitants to flourish, which doesn't necessarily mean more, but better ways of growing and sharing.  

Our five boroughs are a multispecies network, currently unbalanced. We think food forests contain an element of justice, one that we want to amplify. The inequitable distribution of food and the piles of urban food waste require new infrastructures. Community gardens are public spaces, a collision of art and science. We are interested in the stories that food can tell. Eating is both a communal act and a solitary respite. Food, the great equalizer, if only we would let it be. We want the city to bloom.

Team: 

Inclusive Ecologies, Pratt Institute
Cathryn Dwyre, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute 
Ariane Harrison, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute
Wei Lin, MS Architecture 2021, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute
Elliott Maltby, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute
Humna Naveed, MS Urban Design 2021, School of Architecture, Pratt Institute
Nancy Smith, School of Information, Pratt Institute