Urban culinary workshop : re-emphasizing food in the urban environment

Abstract

The practices that have allowed farming to be separated from the city, with the resultant food security concerns, are being globally challenged. Simultaneously, low levels of employable skills in South Africa are magnifying unemployment levels in the country. Concurrently Pretoria has embraced urban programmes to unify urban areas which were previously effectively fragmented by apartheid’s Group Areas Act. This dissertation finds its genesis in this context of multiple concerns where the concurrent issues provide architecture with a unique challenge to interpret and to respond to the revised relationships: • between farming and the city, • between citizens and their cities, and • between unemployment and economic development. This dissertation undertakes the multi-function of addressing these conditions not only in terms of technical intervention, but more importantly by the examination of the changing urban context and by re-embracing food production within the city. The situation created by the crossroads in which the world, the nation and the city of Tshwane find themselves provides an unprecedented opportunity for an architectural expression which is influenced by a fresh re-assessment of local, national and global concerns. This dissertation therefore addresses the proposal not merely as a building but as an active change-generating catalyst.