Re-Stitching the City through Transparent Food Practices

Student project team: Phillip Redpath and Joy Hu

Instructors: Lucia Phinney and Schaeffer Somers

The project evolved from the scrutiny of Baltimore’s intensive seams defined by distinct demographic contrasts between neighborhoods. Interest in food quality and accessibility led  to the development of a series of maps diagramming food sources and health indicators in the Druid Heights neighborhood. These explorations exposed the lack of food availability and revealed the resulting health concerns. To address these concerns, a program was developed that readapts the numerous vacant lots and buildings in the city for farming. This farm network centers on a central food hub that makes food practices transparent to Baltimore residents.

Five principles guided the project: social cohesion, transparency, modularity, education, and sustainable farming. These principles took form in an urban farm network, in which aquaponic farming units occupy abandoned row-houses throughout the city. These farming units feed into the central food hub, a conglomeration of restaurants, education kitchens, and market stalls. These provide a setting for social interaction among area residents, allowing for the exchange of skills between different demographic groups. The hub is a space in which the food process from cultivation to preparation is made transparent. This provides educational opportunities for residents to learn how their food gets to the table.

Modularity was a key principle in the architectural design. The restaurant and educational modules in the hub were adapted to different scales according to their distinct programmatic needs. A series of modular units forms all parts of the interior spaces as well: from tables and seating, to lighting and shelving. This landscape of modular units is unified under a canopy that covers the central hub. The canopy is intended to be a recognizable landmark that distinguishes our hub as central location for social interaction and food access in the city. 

About the studio:  Boundary Formations & Intensive Seams

A  collaboration of two instructors, Schaeffer Somers and Lucia Phinney, in the Spring of 2012 at the University of Virginia School of Architecture. The studio explored Baltimore through extensive research, analysis, and synthetic experimentation as the basis for imagining a transformative intervention in what is referred to as a “down-cycling” city. Survey methods included GIS-based mapping of population demographics, urban health indicators, and geographic data including landforms, soils, and hydrology. High contrast seams in population age, income, education, housing vacancy, neighborhood amenities, and open/green space were framed as “ecotones”, an ecological concept for the overlap of two biomes, where two communities meet and integrate. The urban ecotones identified and mapped by the students became the fertile ground for group projects focused on an intensive site for architecture and landscape as part of an extensive network that fosters and intensifies biological and human flows, resource exchange, equity, reciprocity, and accessibility.