After successful completion of the course, students are able to understand the complexity, meaning and design of food networks and the associated spaces of a city. In the focused analysis phase, students will learn the importance of mapping as a tool for analysis and design processes using a common mapping tool. In addition, students can translate the knowledge gained through the mapping method into concepts and designs and thereby develop a wide variety of approaches for urban transformations.
With the course, students will develop an understanding for food networks and the connected and needed spaces in the city of Vienna. The first phase focuses on the connections and correlations between food production and processing, logistics, wholesale, consumption and distribution as well as food waste and recycling. Furthermore it will be investigated how different food spaces influence the daily life on spatial, structural and process levels (with food spaces are all spaces meant, where food is produced, processed, sold, disposed or recycelt.). In the second phase, we will build in the findings from the first phase and will generate new ideas and designs. Topics for this could be supply infrastructures, growing potentials - urban farming, urban production, new consumption spaces for food, circular economy or innovative processes for materials and resources.
This course is research-based teaching. The students will work in the first phase as part of the research project Food Atlas Wien (Forschungsbereich Städtebau, TU Wien). In doing so, organized in teams and using a mapping method, they investigate and locate all food spaces in selected research areas. As a common working platform, the digital food map of the project Food Atlas Wien will be used. This map offers, next to mapping and georeferenced location of food spaces, also a databank, where contents and categories can be evaluated. In addition, it is necessary to analyze selected areas in depth, in order to unterstand scales, meanings and typologies.
With the findings from the intensive analysis- and mapping phase, the students should individually map potentials in the following design phase and generate ideas and designs regarding future food spaces. These can address spatial designs, social interventions or process-related designs.
Food and the City
In an historic view, the city and its hinterland were strongly connected and in a permanent interaction. Strategically important places left their traces in the urban fabric in the form of spatial expressions (e.g. market places), names (Hoher Markt, Fischerstiege etc.) or processes (taxes or regulations). Through technical innovations, modern transport and digitalization all these structures changed and offer today a blurred image on urban food and its supply. We want to investigate, which rooms are occupied today - from farmer’s market to digital delivery service.
City and Production
In relation to agriculture, we ask ourselves why this has been strategically left out of the planning discourse to date. Vienna has a comparatively large and spatially characteristic share of agricultural land within the city boundary. These agricultural spaces are often in a field of tension with urban expansion processes. Furthermore in Vienna are a lot, partly also identity-forming businesses and factories, who influence neighborhoods spatially and socially. In addition the question arises, which other productive places in the city contribute to the food supply ? How can food supply and urban development be thought together ? Which new typologies could result ?
Food cycles
Food goes through different stages until it reaches the consumer from the producer. Global market economy and linear supply chains dominate what lands on our plates. We want to ask how local cycles work and where they are already working in Vienna. What role can architecture und urban planning play in these systems ?
