Future Food Spaces: Shifting Food Systems and Spatial Reorganization (Book Project with Birkhauser)

Project Details

Description

Future Food Spaces: Shifting food systems and spatial reorganization.

The responses of the spatial disciplines to the effects of the climate and environmental crises have focused to a large extent on the urban context. This conference advances the countryside as a similarly urgent site for analysis and spatial intervention. In the Danish context, the countryside is dominated spatially by industrial food production – covering over 60% of Denmark’s total area – producing disproportionally negative impacts on the environment and on biodiversity, and representing one of Denmark’s greatest barriers to reaching its climate goals.

New and emerging food production technologies, practices, policies, and cultural changes, however, point to potentially massive spatial and environmental implications for the countryside. Controlled-environment vertical-farming technologies for example, (eg. NordicHarvest) use 1/250thof the land area of conventional vegetable crops – opening the potential to replace a proportion of Denmark’s croplands with functions such as afforestation, reflooding drained peatlands, rewilding, etc. The ongoing reappraisal and development of practices such as permaculture and regenerative farming point to another example of transforming spatial and organisational potentials. Some of these technologies and practices also point to the alternative possibilities of food production spaces in urban contexts, closer to where food is consumed. Such developments, however, still generally operate as fragmented niches of activity. Their broader spatial implications and their ability to address climate and environmental goals, and food system resilience remains underexplored.

This project is intended to reflect on the potential for these kinds of evolving developments to unfold new spatial and territorial imaginaries, to redraw conceptual maps of territories and to provoke alternative conceptual understandings of how humans, other species, and food might interact on and within territory. The debate will be supported by a series of interdisciplinary-informed explorations into the possible multi-scalar spatial implications of these developments, and their potential contribution to challenges of climate mitigation, climate adaptation, biodiversity, and food security/sovereignty in times of increased environmental crisis and volatility, and political inertia.
StatusActive
Effective start/end date01/01/2022 → …