architecture & food?

"Close your eyes and think of a city. What do you see?A jumble of rooftops stretching off into the distance? The chaos of Piccadilly Circus? The Manhattan skyline? The street where you live? Whatever it is you imagine it probably involves buildings. They, after all, are what cities are made of, along with the streets and squares that join them all together. But cities are not made of bricks and mortar, they are inhabited by flesh-and-blood humans, and so must rely on the natural world to feed them. Cities, like people, are what they eat..."

"... I understood architecture to be the embodiment of human dwelling in its fullest sense, with politics and culture as its social contexts. landscape and climate as physical ones, and cities its greatest manifestation. Architecture encompassed every aspect of human life-which made the teaching of it in architecture school very limiting. I felt increasingly that in order to study architecture, one had to look away from it-only then could one see it for what it really was. It seemed to me that what was missing from the traditional discipline was life itself: the very thing it was supposed to support. I found the same in practice: discussing projects with clients, it was clear to me that I had somehow learn to think and speak in architectural code that excluded non-practitioners. This struck me as not only wrong, but potentially disastrous. How could architects expect to design spaces for people to inhabit, if we had no proper dialogue with them?....

Carolyn Steel, Introduction, Hungry City