makeshift

We have reached a tipping point in the history of human civilisation.  With over 50% of the world now living in an urban environment, sustaining large concentrations of people will become a big issue in the future.  With oil prices fluctuating and the greater demand for meat and grain in the rapidly industrialising Far East, there has been global increase in food prices by up to 8.3%.  Will there come a point where what you pay for food comes at too great a cost?  It has been said that all cities are days away from anarchy, and considering the population of London consumes a land mass 125 times its own size, it is a chilling proposition.

You are where you eat.

Thankfully, food is a topical issue in the eyes of the public.  We are seeing mass media interest in local foods once again - since globalised food products are the default choice in the typical supermarket, local food has somewhat become the luxury food of the average consumer.  Added value comes not from how far away your food has travelled, but how little - complete with packaging that displays images of the grower, with data of how far raw product has come, that little bit of personality in an otherwise bland but necessary commodity.  For the average consumer, the paradigm of 'you are what you eat' is now synonymous with 'you are where you eat'.

A great amount of diversity is found on your doorstep.  DEFRA figures suggest that 71% of all the UK's apples are imported from overseas, which one to wonder why there seem to be only four varieties available'.  Considering my city of Sheffield alone yields about 30 varieties within its borders, it is little wonder that projects such as Abundance are reaping the rewards of harvesting Sheffield's seasonal glut of fruit year after year,

Lessons from Havana

Havana, Cuba shows us that urban growing programs can successfully manage food production for an entire city. The Urban Pantry contextualises the idea of growing food in the city of Sheffield through collaborative synergy of its communities.  Can Sheffield itself be home to thousands of microfarms of orchards, plots and livestock enclosures that can self sustain the city's inhabitants indefinitely?

With the rise of mass collaboration occurring through the internet, how long will it take for this collaboration to spill over into the real world that takes organisation from the realm of the blogs and onto the urban plot?  Working in the vibrant inner city neighbourhood of Sharrow, the Urban Pantry scheme aims to locate and manage potential food growing sites within a 5-10 minute walk of it.  

Food is inherently a social and cultural entity.  These localised exchanges of food and knowledge cannot even be valued on a purely economic level, but rather as an indicator of wealth built upon social capital (the intangible value of connections between people) not seen in generations.  A well organised Urban Pantry should be a place where people not only eat food in the knowledge that it has travelled in metres and not miles, but becomes an alternative public forum where ongoing community discussions take place next to a vibrant annual calender of events that accommodates the diverse community of which it serves

Redundancy

The built strategy itself is based upon the idea of seasonality and impermanence - a provisional construction.  The Old Sharrow School is a Victorian school that was earmarked for renaovation since the school itself moved to a new facility 300 metres down the road.  In the re-imagining of the school as Urban Pantry, only the masonry shell remains, as a catalyst for further development should the Urban Pantry fail as a scheme through lack of interest - its constituent parts, as an inhabited internal structure, are constructed in such a way that no trace of it is left should a developer acquire the site in the future.  The Urban Pantry therefore through its construction acknowledges its own redundancy when it is no longer useful to the community it serves.  

Indeed, this redundancy has also informed the building servicing strategy; why even bother with building services at all?  This pre-industrialised notion of seasonality is a small pocket of resistance that echoes back to a time where seasons were measured by the passing of the sun, rather than the passing of the hands on a clock.  Or why bother with lighting?  When it gets dark, it's dark - candles and bonfires come out and a meal shared over a fire makes for great conversation, the antidote to today's isolated and hectic lifestyle.  Local food is not just about environmental and economic sustainability; at its core remains the simple fact that food is a necessity, so why not make it fun at the same time?