Food and Urbanism

The Convivial City and a Sustainable Future

Susan Parham

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857854742
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Politica pubblica a livello agricolo

Cities are home to over fifty percent of the world's population, a figure which is expected to increase enormously by 2050. Despite the growing demand on urban resources and infrastructure, food is still often overlooked as a key factor in planning and designing cities. Without incorporating food into the design process – how it is grown, transported, and bought, cooked, eaten and disposed of – it is impossible to create truly resilient and convivial urbanism. Moving from the table and home garden to the town, city, and suburbs, Food and Urbanism explores the connections between food and place in past and present design practices. The book also looks to future methods for extending the 'gastronomic' possibilities of urban space. Supported by examples from places across the world, including the UK, Norway, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Romania, Australia and the USA, the book offers insights into how the interplay of physical design and socio-spatial practices centred around food can help to maintain socially rich, productive and sustainable urban space. Susan Parham brings together the latest research from a number of disciplines – urban planning, food studies, sociology, geography, and design – with her own fieldwork on a range of foodscapes to highlight the fundamental role food has to play in shaping the urban future.

PART ONE

Food, Domesticity and Design

CHAPTER ONE

Starting with the Table

Introduction

This chapter is the first of the two that deal with scales of urbanism predominantly tied to domestic spaces, focusing in on tablescapes, kitchens and dining rooms in this chapter, and home gardens as food spaces in the next. In so doing it situates these spaces as legitimate areas for urbanist analysis of food. It suggests that domestic as well as public spaces are central to developing convivial urbanism, and thus the appropriate place for the book to start in scale terms. As noted in the Introduction, the categories of private and public can no longer be conceived as entirely different and separate from each other but have become blurred, and work in a range of disciplines has explored the implications of these disruptions to traditional dualist notions about city form. What happens at the small domestic scale, nominally private, is often closely intertwined with the events and transformations at wider scales that are understood as public. Thus the inclusion of chapters that focus on (largely) private space is predicated on and explores this connectivity in its approach to food and urbanism.

This chapter begins by examining the way that the table (or its symbolic equivalent in spatial design terms) has been and continues to act as perhaps the fundamental site for expressing conviviality through sharing food. It argues that this sharing is both a material and a symbolic re-creation of ourselves in daily socio-spatial practice that is at the heart of sustainable urbanism. Tracing the historic evolution of the table (and table-like) spaces, the chapter considers both these sites’ convivial and exclusionary capacities, particularly in gender terms, with special attention to the contemporary role of design from the micro scale of the platescape outwards. The evolving nature of kitchen design and its complicated relationship with eating space is explored, with insights from across a range of disciplines and places that are particularly tied to the rise of modernism in food design terms. It could be argued that the chapter’s examples and the trajectory of the discussion overall are somewhat Eurocentric in nature, but the book does not make claims to universal coverage – nor could it encompass this vast field in one text although efforts are made to demonstrate the spatial diversity of examples that reflect aspects of the discussion. Rather, the aim is to explore what seem important aspects of these scales of urbanism in food terms while acknowledging the need for further research to build a more complete picture in theory and practice.

‘Where is urbanism and why do we care about tables?’

As set out in the Introduction, urbanism does not start from the front door of the dwelling but is fundamentally tied to spatial expressions within domestic spaces of various kinds. The domestic is a central aspect of human settlement, and to return to the definition of urbanism offered in the Introduction, the way food is represented at home has significant implications for urban sustainability, social justice and cultural understanding. Moreover, in food terms conviviality through food sharing seems to be universal to different human cultures, and it is argued that a critical site for such expressions is the table or its spatial equivalent. In exploring instances from historical practice before moving on to the contemporary, the intention is to demonstrate longitudinally some of the recurrent themes of conviviality and sustainability tied to this scale of food and design from a wide range of times and places, reinforcing that this is not simply reducible to a historically or locationally specific phenomenon.

Exploring sources for table-based conviviality provides a diverse range of exam­ples. Spatialized expressions of conviviality through feasting together are evi­denced from early Greek and Roman sources (Wilkins and Hill 2006: 63), as well as from Mesopotamian representations of table-bound banqueters found on dynastic seals (Bray 2003: 22) to the patio-based Mayan elite feasting of the 650–1000 AD period (Hendon 2003: 210). As is noted in relation to the Roman banquet, ‘convivial eating and drinking formed one of the most significant social rituals in the Roman world, inextricably interwoven into the fabric of public and domestic life’ (Dunbabin 2003: 2).

The design arrangements and location of the table or table-like space may have shifted culturally over time, with eating together moving from the hall or evolving living space where the cooking fire was located, to the separation of the cooking function into the kitchen and the dining room specifically constructed for food consumption, but the convivial notion of the shared meal in a particular physical space has remained fairly constant. This shared meal around a material or metaphorical table expresses conviviality by reaffirmation and solidarity, marking daily life, the seasons and stages in agricultural production, especially the harvest. It is symbolic of family, kinship and other social ties. Mealtime is the site for socializing children into an understanding of commensality (Ochs and Shohet 2006). The shared meal provides a process for social reinforcement and cohesion that is fundamental because it occurs over and through food. Social isolation, by contrast, can be signified by complete retreat from the conviviality of the shared meal, as in the extreme example of more than two million hikikomori of Japan – young people who never come out of their bedrooms at all and subsist on food left for them on trays by their mothers (Ronald and Hirayama 2009).

The table or table-like space as the site for conviviality is also of great religious significance (Sered 1988: 135; Feeley-Harnik 1995; Fernández-Armesto 2002), as by ‘establishing who eats what with whom, commensality is one of the most powerful ways of defining and differentiating social groups’ (Feeley-Harnik 1994: 11). Just as fasting practices reflect religious belonging (Bynum 1988), every major religion has a table-based sacramental meal representing new life or rebirth (Visser 1987). In Christianity the presence at the table is crucial to the religious symbolism of the Last Supper; in Judaism the Passover ritual has its specially set Seder table, while the Sofreh cloth is central to religious observance across religions in Iran (Shirazi 2005). More broadly, for many, the ancestors are present at the table which operates as a space for collective memory. In contrast to hierarchical dining norms, Christian dining and worship in Roman houses was unusual in its time because the diners were perceived as equal before God and table seating status related only to the level of conversion into Christianity (Sennett 1994). In design terms, too, the Roman dining room became the basis for church design in the West: in the meal for materialists the sacramental table represents life itself. The table is also the site for acting out dietary habits and food proscriptions that by creating absences seek to reaffirm religious belonging (Anderson 2005: 156). Even though the historical antecedents of halal and kosher foods have been argued to have originated in specific agricultural, regional and hygiene needs (Harris 1985), they may now be followed as an article of faith, not through necessity.

Yet dining at the table or in a space that represents this in design terms can also present a fundamental paradox: on the one side conferring conviviality and solidarity through familial, social or religious belonging, on the other capable of representing status differences, subordination and control. The lack of a table-like spatial structure therefore is not inherently unconvivial, as the flexible dining arrangements of some Japanese dining spaces make clear through their dynamic response to seasonal conditions (Ashkenazi and Jacob 2000; Kazuko and Yasuko 2001; Ronald and Hirayama 2009). However, it is in those places where the physical structure of the table is strongly connected to sharing food that its absence, or absence from it, can undermine conviviality. Those given an inferior place or excluded altogether express through their placement the unequal power relations that dining together reaffirms. The table thus provides the space for power plays over status and control; ritual expressions of domination and subordination are demonstrated, and unequal relations of race, class and gender are magnified by the rituals of dinner (Visser 1993). As Malcolm X wrote, ‘I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American’ (in Feeley-Harnik 1994: 13).

Obviously, this is not new. The Spartan sussita (messes) offered sometimes-minimal rations of barley-cake, wine and ‘a small piece of meat in the infamous black soup’, but only male citizens could eat here (Wilkins and Hill 2006: 64). In Greek cities large public dining spaces in civic buildings, the prytaneia, were sites for honorific feasting among men (Wilkins and Hill 2006: 64), and, while it came to mean a large public feast, the Roman convivium was originally a meal for friends which was ‘intended to express a relationship between equals as well as an opportunity for patrons to entertain clients and probably show off their wealth’ (Alcock 2006: 197). This was an occasion in which women sometimes took part (Alcock 2006: 197), yet even where a table per se was not a part of the dining configuration, as in the Roman triclinium, where guests reclined on couches, placement was considered to be of exceptional importance (Amery and Curran 2002). The less important or hangers on of the host were not allowed to recline but humiliated by being made to perch on stools (Visser 1993) while the most important were placed at the right-hand end of the couch (Bowes 2010: 57). Roman dining rooms were, in fact, spaces that could be used in a variety of ways, not just dining, and space syntax analysis of Roman domestic spaces suggests that there was ‘an enormous diversity of spatial patterning’ (Bowes 2010: 41). Some scholars take the view that the emergence of particular dining room configurations owed most to the development of the curved dining couch or stibadium (Bowes 2010: 28) which reflected increased rigidity in dining behaviour whereby portable couches were replaced by permanent semicircular couches (Bowes 2010: 55). In later Roman houses of the elite, where patronage was both symbolized and acted out through dining ‘even interactions between peers took on more hierarchical arrangements. The apse of the dining room held guests in a vice like grip, as dinners became ritualized theatre, while the apse of the reception room framed the dominus as mini-emperor’ (Bowes 2010: 55).

Status gradations in the medieval hall were similarly expressed through diner placement. The bulky hall table comprised trestles and boards which could be set up and dismantled at need, and not only the quality of the linen that marked out those spaces reserved for the master and his guests, but also a strict hierarchy according to status governed the seating placement (Henisch 1986: 147, 151). As the elite tended to distance themselves from others they sat at high table, and eventually physically withdrew into a separate room. Diners in the hall needed to be able to see the important people (and be aware of their symbolic power), and seating arrangements down one side of the trestle allowed this. It mattered who was at high table and who placed beneath the salt. As Visser (1993) has noted, arrangements for modern banquets tend to hark back to this layout, but here there may be denial that status is an important matter so that there is great difficulty in achieving seating arrangements at the table to everybody’s satisfaction, whereas in contemporary practice in Japan, such spatial hierarchy is explicitly and strongly formalized in the way that Sumo wrestlers eat chanko (stew): the top wrestlers or important guests eat first (Tierney and Ohnuki-Tierney 2012).

The table is also the site for playing out food denial, inequality and food dis­orders. It provides a compelling dramatic space for disturbed or negative practices and relationships in which food may be used to express confusion, rage, pain and exclusion. Anorexic and bulimic behaviours, for example, are now more common than generally recognized (Hoek and Van Hoeken 2003), and while they resist clear explanations, family dynamics at the table are generally thought to be involved (Ackard and Neumark-Sztainer 2001; Haworth-Hoeppner 2004). Work on dining in settings like old peoples’ homes and hospital wards for those with dementia shows conversely that dining together helps those thus institutionalized to want to eat (Day et al. 2000; Wright et al. 2006). For some the table is the pre-eminent symbol of decadent or exclusionary consumption. Writing Down and Out in Paris and London in the early 1930s, George Orwell viewed the tables of diners seen from the gruesome kitchens of the Ritz as quintessentially expressing a decadent, corrupt urban life, contrasted with a more morally correct austerity. Historians have likewise drawn attention to the trajectory of the London club from its coffeehouse antecedents (Cowan 2004, 2005; Burnett 2004; Ellis 2011). Women were largely excluded (except as servers or prostitutes) from this intellectually influential masculine space of debate and curiosity (Clery 1991; Cowan 2001). This exclusion had significant knock-on effects given the coffeehouse’s argued basis for the development of the public sphere (Habermas 1989). The related growth of clubland dining in the nineteenth century (McDouall 1974) reflected a muscular, great house and public-school-inflected gastronomy, very much a male domain that continued into the twentieth century (and was amusingly parodied in Wodehouse’s Drones and Junior Ganymede clubs for master and man). Similarly, while dons famously dined well, Virginia Woolf (1984) described bad food in women’s colleges as signifying contempt by those serving them for the temerity of women seeking ‘unfeminine’ education (a theme receiving extreme expression in Dorothy Sayers’ Gaudy Night of 1935).

Historically, for women a place at the table has been hedged about and conditional. Expected at once to play out a role ascribed as natural in ensuring conviviality is maintained, and in socializing children to be convivial by instilling table manners, women have themselves often been given an inferior position, eaten less or less favoured foods, or been barred from the table altogether. In ancient Greek examples dinners were only for peers (although subtle gradations of status and power were evident); the lower orders and women were not invited. In elite Roman dining, while women were present and shared couches with husbands, they only did so because their husbands provided legitimacy for their presence there (Sennett 1994). Much later, in nineteenth-century elite house plans, the rituals of women’s post-dinner withdrawal from the table were clearly expressed, with architectural arrangements becoming more complex further up the social scale. The conditions of the servant hall table similarly mirrored these mores above stairs, with a strict hierarchy determining table presence and position.

Like women, children similarly have had their lower status reinforced by exclusions from the table, including being required to dine at different times from adults or by being given a special and lesser part of the table at which they are sometimes expected to stand or perch rather than sit. This artificiality may be used to give adults separate space and time away from children and serves as the basis for deciding some foods, and later dining hours, are unsuitable for them (Visser 1993). That such arrangements are culturally constructed, not natural, is evidenced by substantial differences between, say, French, Italian and Anglo traditions (Visser 1993). In some places children eat the same foods and experience the same hours of dining at the same table: in Italian families it was traditionally considered proper for children to experience the full rituals of dinner.

What and how people eat at the table is also of planning and design interest. From the food...