Designing Food Cycles: Three Pathways Toward Urban Resilience

Abstract

This contribution refers to the creative actions led by the Leibniz University Hannover (LUH) in the framework of the Creative Food Cycles project. It gives an overview of current speculations and testing in designing food cycles, based on the notions of urban metabolism and resilient food systems. A selection of best practices contained in the Food Interaction Catalogue is presented to enlighten spatial qualities, societal benefits, and actors’ constellations being boosted creatively in the market, kitchen, and table setups. The nine prototypes conceived during the workshop ‘Food Cycles Pop-Up” are illustrated, as explorations and potential inventions for “urban food hotspots”. Finally, three pathways towards urban resilience are briefly traced towards a regional and local development based on food cycles.