Edible Urban Futures (ABPL90446)

Food security is of growing concern globally. While much of the focus is on agricultural and logistic industries, professionals in the built environment must understand how their own work affects food security issues and how design can contribute to enhancing food security locally.

By engaging in collaborations between institutions around the world, this subject will allow students to gain a range of local perspectives on the challenge. Students will learn that global problems often require very local solutions that can be informed by applicable lessons in other locales.

In particular, students will develop a depth of knowledge regarding food security and the implications for the built environment, develop their abilities to explain the theoretical foundations of this issue and will select and apply appropriate methodologies when designing for food security. These learnings are useful for design more broadly.

This will be a multidisciplinary elective, in which students will work with experts from disciplines collaboratively to learn about different approaches to address the similar issues across the globe. The goal of this subject is to develop each student’s ability to listen and learn from peers while drawing on the global body of research; additionally, the subject will be an opportunity to establish future collaborations and research activities.

Students from the partner institutions will be working in mixed teams. They will focus on data collection, analysis, and interpretation to develop proposals and communicate these to target audiences. They will be asked to communicate by means of an information campaign in the form of videos, pamphlets, or posters, describing challenges, threats, and solutions regarding food securities.