Everyone is a Foodie

Reconnecting with Food in the City

Selina Chau

Susan Herrington

Urban living has distanced our relationship with food.

Food consumption behaviours in cities have become a major contributor to climate change and increasing health risks. Eaters are agents of selection, and every human eater slowly reformulates the planet as they consume it. This project addresses the unhealthy and unsustainable relationship between people and food in the city through the redesign of public spaces in the urban landscape.

Everyone is a foodie envisions an urban landscape that reconnects people to their environment, community, and self through food. It imagines a cultural space that invites people to reflect on their everyday relationship with food, and consider themselves as actors as opposed to merely consumers within the greater food system.

Located in Vancouver, between Granville Island and the Arbutus Greenway, the proposed site provides opportunity to reconnect people to existing foodscapes culturally embedded in the city. It transforms underutilized spaces beneath the Fir Street Ramp into a unique public space integrated with diverse sustainable food practices and creates anew landscape for discussion and activity on the future of food.