Bartlett Research Conversations: Xiuzheng Li

Understanding the Communal Kitchen as an Infrastructure of Care

Speaker: Xiuzheng Li
Supervisors: Dr Clare Melhuish and Tim Waterman
Guest panellist: Prof Jos Boys

Abstract

Architectural historian Peter Davey describes the domestic kitchen as “the heart of the dwelling”, underlining its central position and its social and sensual significance in everyday life. However, with declining home-cooking habits and shrinking kitchen spaces in British households, its traditional role and functions are under growing threat, states Carolyn Steel in her book Hungry City.

Grounding the research in a critique of modernist kitchen design and institutionalised urban food systems, this doctoral thesis explores the potential for the communal kitchen to remediate people’s relationship with others through the process of cooking and eating together. In doing so, it posits whether the communal kitchen can be an infrastructure of care.

The research examines the history, spatial and design characteristics, and social values of communal kitchens through case studies in London. It will explore how the communal kitchen can promote the reconfiguration of the socio-material networks embedded in culinary practice, to produce a renewed ‘infrastructure of care’ in contemporary urban industrialised society.

About The Bartlett Research Conversations

The Bartlett School of Architecture’s Research Conversations seminars comprise work-in-progress and upgrade presentations by students undertaking the Architectural Design MPhil/PhD and Architectural and Urban History and Theory MPhil/PhD. All current UCL staff and students are welcome to attend.

Held regularly throughout the academic year, the seminars are attended by the programme directors, Professor Jonathan Hill and Professor Sophia Psarra, PhD Coordinators, Dr. Nina Vollenbröker and Dr Sophie Read, and other PhD supervisors.

Image: 'Bonnington Café in London: An Autonomous Communal Kitchen Practice.' Composite image by Xiuzheng Li (including engineering drawing on left side from Lambeth Planning and Building Control, and photos on right taken by Xiuzheng Li)