Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World - Bartlett International Lecture Series

This event will be streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel at 18:00 GMT. No registration is required.

About

Streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel, this event will be a discussion between co-hosts Rebeca Allen Tejerina, Tabatha Crook, Xan Goetzee-Barral, Hansen (Shuhan) Wang, Jun
Zhang, Sara Shafiei and speaker Carolyn Steel. 

This event forms part of The Bartlett International Lecture Series Autumn 2020.  

Abstract

This event will discuss Carolyn Steel’s concept of sitopia - a world shaped by food (from the Greek sitos, meaning food, and topos, meaning place). Food is our most vital shared commodity, inextricably woven into the social and spatial structures of our lives. The way we produce, trade, consume and waste food influences everything from our bodies, habits, politics and economies, to our cities, landscapes and climate.  

The speakers will examine how, by failing to value food, we have created a way of life that threatens us and our planet. Climate change, deforestation, soil erosion, water depletion, pollution, mass extinction, diet-related disease and the current pandemic are just some of the side-effects of the way we eat. By restoring food’s true value and harnessing its power to shape our lives, we can not only reverse these ills, but learn how to flourish on our crowded, overheating planet. 

Speaker biography 

Carolyn Steel is a leading thinker on food and cities. A British architect and academic, she is the award-winning author of Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives (2008) and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (2020). Her concept of sitopia has gained international recognition across a broad range of fields in design, ecology, academia and the arts.

A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects in London, Carolyn studied at Cambridge University and has taught at several universities including Cambridge, London Metropolitan, Wageningen and the London School of Economics. Carolyn's TED talk has received more than one million views and in August 2020, she was featured in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme.

Image: Allegory of the Effects of Good Government (1338) by Ambrogio Lorenzetti – a fourteenth-century sitopia.
          

View the full schedule for The Bartlett International Lecture Series - Autumn 2020