Sitopia
by Carolyn Steel
What might cities look like a hundred years from now? Predicting the future is never easy, but if cities in the 21st century look much as they do today, only bigger, we will have failed the greatest ecological challenge of our time. Cities have always plundered the natural world for resources, but in the past, so few people lived in them - just three per cent in 1800 - that their impact was limited. Today, with half the global population living in cities and a further three billion expected to join them by 2050, the opposite is the case. If the future is urban, we urgently need to redefine what that means.
Of all the resources needed to sustain a city, none is more important than food. In the past, this was self-evident: the sheer difficulty of feeding cities made it so. Without the benefit of agrichemicals, farm machinery, refrigeration and rapid transport, cities were forced to be both frugal and inventive with their food supplies. No city was ever built without first considering how it was to be sustained, and, once established, cities kept 'food miles' to a minimum, growing perishables such as fruit and vegetables in the city fringes, and raising animals such as pigs and chickens within the city itself. Fresh foods, including grass-fed livestock, were consumed seasonally, with the excess preserved by salting, drying or pickling, to be consumed during leaner months. No food was ever wasted: kitchen scraps were fed to pigs, and human and animal waste was collected and spread as fertiliser on suburban market gardens.
Today, things are very different. We take it for granted that, if we walk into a restaurant or supermarket, food will be there, having arrived magically from somewhere else. We have become careless of food, because industrialisation has made feeding cities seem easy. But in reality, industrial food systems are destroying the planet faster than any human activity in history. Food and agriculture together account for one third of global greenhouse gas emissions. An estimated 19 million hectares of rainforest are lost every year to agriculture, while a further 20 million of existing arable are lost to salinisation and erosion. Every calorie of food we consume in the West has taken an average ten calories to produce. Four planet earths would be needed if we all ate like Americans, yet half of the food produced in the USA is thrown away. A billion people worldwide are overweight, while a further billion starve. The global food industry is deeply flawed, yet this is the system upon which modern urban life depends.
We urgently need a new model for dwelling - one that recognises cities as organic entities, intimately bound to the natural world. My proposal is sitopia, meaning 'food-place'. Sitopia is, in essence, a way of recognising how powerfully food already shapes our lives, and harnessing its power to shape the world better. Food affects, not just our daily habits, but our social, political and economic structures, cultural attitudes, value systems - our very conception of what it means to be human. Food is the great connector. If we can learn to share it as a conceptual and practical tool, we can use it to shape a better common future.
