Feeding the Future City family event

On Saturday 23 May the Architecture Centre held a fun and creative drop-in workshop where families were asked to ponder how cities of the future will feed themselves, as part of the Architecture Centre’s City Ideas Studio food season. Models of possible designs for a future city were built; demonstrating various ways cities of the future could feed themselves sustainably, using buildings and spaces to maximise the amount of food it grows. This is important because as the population of the world increases and more people in cities (some in Megacities of 10 million+ people), transport and space will be limited and expensive, we will need to grow more food and more in our cities to decrease transport costs.

Families were asked to think of ways we can utilise any public space to grow food locally, growing food on and in houses/flats, urban food farms and reducing food waste, transport and energy costs. The models were added to our future model city and there were many innovative and creative ideas including:

• Bananas grown from lampposts
• Vertical farming in the form of a ‘tower of carrots’
• Open top buses that will grow food on the roof
• A ferry that transports and grows plums, utilising water space

Families who took part were given edible seedlings to take home and grow into tasty beans. Children that were inspired by the drop-in workshop were encouraged to enter the Architecture Centre’s My Green City Design Challenge for schools. #mygreencity

You can download a copy of the Feeding the Future City Family Activity here and the Image Montage sheet here.

This event was part of the Architecture Centre’s My Green City 2015 Learning and Participation programme and took place during our City Ideas Studio food residency.