Reclaiming the Habitat: Food, Fire and Affordance in Designing and Living the Urban

Written by: Stamatis Zografos, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL and Liana Psarologaki, Buckinghamshire New University

This essay – Reclaiming the Habitat: Food, Fire and Affordance in Designing and Living the Urban – is a critical and radical proposition to reclaim habitats of life, investigating ecological and pedagogical models of critical and spatial design practices. The authors examine urban commons through the politics of food, fire and affordance, exploring these as agents shaping the assemblage of life through design and repositioning them as cues for methods of thinking, learning, designing and constructing conditions of life.

Current urban design practices often overlook the ecological, pedagogical and commoning potentials of everyday phenomena such as food and fire, instead reinforcing capitalist logics of fear, desire, consumption and stagnation. The chapter addresses how the vilification of fire (linked to fear) and food (linked to desire) affects how we think about and practice life, with ramifications for how we design, make and consume objects and environments.

In response, the authors propose new ecologies and pedagogies in urban design practice, promoting affordances between bodies, buildings and commons as urban conflict. By approaching conflict as affordance and a collective shaping agent, the essay fosters public sharing through dynamic networks. This challenges dominant institutions and opens opportunities to rethink citizenship and urban living.

The research aims to reshape design pedagogy and practice by repositioning urban commoning as central to citizenship, fostering more dynamic, equitable and sustainable forms of collective life.

This chapter is published in Design Commons: Practices, Processes and Crossovers (Springer International Publishing, 2022), edited by Gerhard Bruyns and Stavros Kousoulas.

About the publication

The Design Research Foundations series provides a platform for publishing state-of-the-art research on foundational issues in design and its applications in industry and society. Topics range from methodological issues in design research to philosophical reflections on the specificities of design. The series takes an inclusive approach to design, spanning disciplines from engineering to architecture and covering conceptual issues through design experiments and prototypes to evaluative studies.

Image: Firepit (2024), by Eva Bachmann