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Subject
Understanding the Communal Kitchen as An Infrastructure of Care
First and second supervisors
Abstract
The domestic kitchen is described by architectural historian Peter Davey 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 by the continuous institutionalisation of urban daily food routines, 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 alternative potential for the communal kitchen to remediate people’s relationship with others, including both human and non-human actors, 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, agencies, and social values of communal kitchens through two comparative case studies in Vauxhall and Camden, London. It will explore how the communal kitchen can promote the reconfiguration of the socio-material networks embedded in daily culinary practice, to produce a renewed ‘infrastructure of care’ that nurtures care relations and practices in contemporary urban industrialised society.
Biography
Xiuzheng Li is currently a PhD candidate in the Architectural & Urban History & Theory program at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. His research concerns the relationship between food-related spaces, everyday practice, social infrastructure and the ethics of care in architecture and landscape history and theory. His interests and experience also include the practice and theory of post-industrial landscape and urbanisation in multicultural contexts. Before joining Bartlett, Xiuzheng was awarded a B.Arch degree and a M.Arch degree from Tsinghua University, and then completed a MLA degree from Harvard GSD. He previously worked as a Teaching Assistant at Tsinghua and as a Research Associate in the Office For Urbanization at the GSD. His previous work won the first prize of the 2017 UIA Seoul International Ideas Competition, the Award of Excellence in the 2020 WLA Awards for the Student, etc.
Image: Xiuzheng Li