Rapporteur’s comments on four sessions about ‘Food Matters’

Final Published versio

Workshop Proceedings - Connected communities ‘Mini charrette’ for arts, culture and heritage in Milton Keynes

This workshop report documents a mini charrette run at Bradwell Abbey in Milton Keynes as part of the New Towns and Garden Cities Heritage research project for which Dr Parham is a co-investigato

Gastronomic Strategies for Australian Cities

Exploring design responses to improve the sustainability of Australian cities in food terms from the scale of the table to that of urban rural fringe agriculturePeer reviewe

Garden Cities - Why Not?

Here is a conundrum. Garden Cities are almost universally seen as a good idea, but we seem to have difficulties creating any new ones. Why is this the case? That question forms the basis of this paper. We want to know what is preventing us from doing so? Why is it that we have not managed to build any real Garden Cities since Letchworth and Welwyn Garden Cities were established in the early 20th century? Although some new developments - badged as Garden Cities and Garden Towns - are in the pipeline, do they deliver the key elements that conform to and bolster the brand? Why is it that we seem to be unable to fund successfully, nor come to that, build and govern places that follow Garden City principles anymore? How can we work out what is stopping us from achieving these goals? And how can we overcome these impediments so that we can start building proper Garden Cities again? So, in this paper, we ask: Garden Cities – Why Not

Living in an Age-Friendly Community: Evidence from a Masterplanned Development in Southwest Sydney

© 2023 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).This paper is situated at the interface of a growing urban studies literature concerned with ‘masterplanning’ practices in urban planning and another, hitherto relatively discrete, body of research concerned with age-friendly cities and communities. The authors are interested in exploring a gap in aging in place literature around how neighbourhoods and residential settings developed with aging in place principles in mind are experienced and perceived by residents. To explore this research gap, the authors analyse qualitative (primarily interview and focus group) data collected in Park Central, a masterplanned development located in the Campbelltown suburb in the southwest region of the Sydney metropolitan area, Australia. This development was delivered in response to a need identified by the state’s land and property development agency, Landcom, for more diverse and affordable medium-density housing in Campbelltown. In particular, a need was identified for housing developments that would be able to sustainably accommodate the changing lifestyle needs of a maturing population in the region. Drawing on our thematic analysis of our data, we discern three key themes in research participants’ experiences of Park Central as a place for aging. These themes are elaborated via recourse to excerpts from our data and discussed with a view to informing how the conception, development and practice of further age-friendly communities is approached.Peer reviewe

Learning sustainable urbanism lessons from ‘other’ New Towns in the UK: : Contributing to design for health and wellbeing in the postwar British New Towns (and beyond)

The following presentation to a Sorbonne New Towns Study Day held in April 2022, explores the contribution of New Towns to health, housing and wellbeing, arguing it is useful to widen out scope of what can be defined as a New Town. This allows learning from other contemporary New Town forms in reshaping both post war New Towns and other places including new ‘Garden City model sympathetic’ settlements. We argue that we can also learn from successful but somewhat ‘othered’ New Towns such as Poundbury in Dorchester and exemplar schemes elsewhere. In the context of critical sustainability issues at global and UK level, a potential contribution of ‘other’ New Towns to meet contemporary challenges in making and retrofitting sustainable places, should be acknowledged and explored. This paper therefore draws out such lessons on planning, urban design and retrofitting with view to contributing to discussion of New Towns today in relation to maximising health, housing and wellbeing for all.Non peer reviewe

Getting there: learning from engagement practice on convivial urbanism to develop productive urban landscapes

In this paper presented to the International Association of Landscape Ecology conference in Warsaw (July 2022) we reflect on peri-urban food focused initiatives broadly framed around sustainable, convivial urbanism, which have sought to employ highly socially engaged methods for working together on productive urban landscapes. Productive urban landscapes approaches share an applied focus across varied urban space: from dense city quarters to peri-urban edges. There is a shared need to develop and reconfigure sustainable productive landscapes and townscapes in diverse spatial settings. All of these respond to urgent climate change, biodiversity and environmental justice challenges. We assert that while we may know where we need to go to make and remake productive urban landscapes - how to get there remains an extremely vexed issue despite the rich theoretical framing now available.Peer reviewe

Exploring London's food quarters: Urban design and social process in three food-centred spaces.

This thesis considers three food-centred spaces in London. Drawing on theoretical perspectives from sociology, geography, urban design and morphology, it explores the spatial and social transformation of the Borough Market, Broadway Market and Exmouth Market areas through the revival of their food markets. Using a mix of methods including interviews, observations, mapping and urban design analysis, the case study-based research situates these neighbourhoods along a continuum of food quarter development. The work reflects on the quarters not only as fast gentrifying locations in which renewal is grounded in new forms of conspicuous food consumption, but as places that also support changing - and potentially less alienating - relationships between sustainable urban form, urban design context and convivial social processes focused on food. It is argued that the aspatiality of much sociological research into foodscapes tends to underemphasise the connections between the physical and the social, which in the three food quarters are nuanced and complicated. On the one hand, food quarters are experienced by some, after Bourdieu (1984), as 'mini habituses' (Bridge, 2006) in which identity construction is linked to distinction based on food, and modelled on particular forms of food consumption. On the other hand, despite sometimes 'idealised narratives' (Butler, 2007) of community' formation, food quarters may also make a contribution to developing more sustainable cities, by supporting and nurturing convivial socio-spatial food practices that sometimes transcend commodification. In particular, the thesis explores how compact city design, founded on a strong sense of place, underpins local economic vitality, and informs the richness of experiences of food and eating. The thesis concludes that despite some gentrifying effects, the food quarters are in certain respects defying dominant spatialised trends evident in London, to develop in a more convivial, gastronomically rich and sustainable way

Planning Cooperative Data Curation Services

Presented at Open Repositories 2011, Austin, Texas, June 8-11