Transforming the Food Axis: Houses, Tools, Modes of Analysis

The open-plan house has usually been explained as the result of architects' modernist aesthetic aims. In the early twentieth century these flowing spaces that housed reception and social functions excluded the kitchen. However, in both popular and architect-designed houses after World Warn, a kitchen was often opened up to the other social spaces in the house. What caused this shift along the food axis (food preparation, storage, and service spaces) from closed and service-oriented to open and sociable? The changing role of women and a changing household economy explains the spatial redefinition of the kitchen, and suggests some new methods for the analysis of domestic space. Résumé L'avènement de la maison à aires ouvertes est habituellement perçu comme l'aboutissement des visées esthétiques des architectes contem-porains. Au début du XXe siècle, les vastes espaces qui répondaient aux fonctions sociales et aux réceptions excluaient la cuisine. Néanmoins, dans les habitations populaires et les demeures dessinées par les architectes après la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la cuisine s'est souvent ouverte aux autres espaces sociaux. À quoi doit-on ce déplacement de l'axe de l'alimentation (préparation de la nourriture, entreposage et aires de service), c'est-à-dire des espaces clos, purement fonctionnels, vers des aires ouvertes, conviviales? Le rôle nouveau des femmes et l'évolution de l'économie ménagère expliquent la redéfinition spatiale de la cuisine et suggèrent quelques méthodes inédites pour l'analyse de l'espace domestique

Landscape, Kitchen, Table: Compressing the Food Axis to Serve a Food Desert

In the past, cities and their food system were spatially interwoven. However, rapid urbanization and the creation of industrialized agriculture have physically isolated and psychologically disconnected urban residents from the landscape that sustains them. Cities can no longer feed themselves and must rely on a global hinterland. Vital growing, preserving, and cooking knowledge has been lost, while negative health, economic, and environmental effects continue to develop from this separation. Low-income neighborhoods have significantly been affected where a lack of income and mobility pose barriers to adequate food access. Architects have addressed food issues individually, but have yet to take an integrative approach that meaningfully engages urban citizens with all processes of the food system. Urban planners have recently taken a holistic design approach to food issues through the development of the community food system concept. By applying this idea to an architectural program I have designed a Community Food Center for the Five Points Neighborhood in East Knoxville, TN. Spatially compressing and layering food activity spaces preserves the majority of the landscape on site for food production. The kitchen, dining room, market, and garden increase access to healthy food while serving as community gathering spaces, and the business incubator kitchens provide economic opportunities. The whole facility acts to educate and engage people in the growing, harvesting, preserving, cooking, sharing, and composting of food. Cities cannot sustain themselves by only providing spaces for consumption. Architects must challenge the accepted relationships between food system spaces and strive to reincorporate productive landscapes and spaces dedicated to transforming raw ingredients into a variety of architectural programs. Although the Five Points Community Food Center is site specific, the concept of integrating multiple food activities into a single architectural entity can be used as a tool for place making by expressing a local identity through food culture while improving the social and economic fabric

Getting beyond the surface : using geometric data analysis in cultural sociology

Geometric Data Analysis (GDA) refers to a group of statistical techniques that disclose underlying patterns in categorized data. GDA represents categories of variables and individuals as points in a multi-dimensional Euclidean space. This contribution presents some of GDA’s analytic properties and their connection to a relational approach of the social world. Moreover, the potential of GDA for cultural sociology will be discussed. What does GDA add to insights based on ‘orthodox’ correlational techniques and exactly how does it get beyond the surface of things? Research on the association between cultural consumption and socio-economic background will serve as an illustration

FOOD STAMP PARTICIPATION AMONG LOW-INCOME HOUSEHOLDS: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS OF THE IMPACT ON THE DEMAND FOR FOOD

Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety,

Regulatory axes on food advertising to children on television

This article describes and evaluates some of the criteria on the basis of which food advertising to children on television could be regulated, including controls that revolve around the type of television programme, the type of product, the target audience and the time of day. Each of these criteria potentially functions as a conceptual device or "axis" around which regulation rotates. The article considers examples from a variety of jurisdictions around the world, including Sweden and Quebec. The article argues that restrictions centring on the time of day when a substantial proportion of children are expected to be watching television are likely to be the easiest for consumers to understand, and the most effective in limiting children's exposure to advertising

CLASS, CONSUMPTION, AND LIFESTYLES IN URUGUAY

The advance of neoliberalism in the last quarter of the twentieth century transformed the material culture of Latin American societies. Consumerism became a prominent means of expressing and realizing citizen’s rights and freedoms. As the commodification of material life gains importance, the patterns of class differentiation are expected to revolve, increasingly, around consumption. In this thesis, I examine the classic sociological proposition that consumption plays a fundamental role in the making of differentiating lifestyles, and that such lifestyles delimit and reinforce social class cleavages. From this perspective, I study the statistical relations between social structure and consumption, determining the extent to which class differences account for variation in a set of consumption patterns inferred from the National Survey of Household Expenditures and Incomes conducted in Uruguay in 2005/2006. I pick a set of food and non-food items and use Multiple Correspondence Analysis to assess how the acquisition of specific goods and services cluster along different dimensions and thus reveal different consumption patterns. For food consumption, I identify a first dimension expressing the distinction between a diversified and good quality diet, and a restricted and lower quality diet. A second dimension revolves around the acquisition of calorific and “filling” food. For non-food consumption, the first principal dimension makes the difference between the possession or not of omnivorous tastes / positional goods, while the second dimension distinguishes between the quest for an aesthetic / outward oriented lifestyle and a comfort-seeking / inward oriented lifestyle. To test class effects on these consumption patterns, I fit a set of linear regression models, using the predicted scores derived from MCA as dependent variables. I confirm that 1) there is an overall class effect on consumption patterns, 2) both income and education mediate such an effect, and 3) there is a specific class effect on consumption that is not reducible to the effect of purchasing power and educational attainment

Flexibilitat i igualtat de gènere en l'habitatge

En les properes pàgines mira-rem d’analitzar l’habitatge des d’una perspectiva doble: d’una banda, parant atenció als espais que configuren la llar i que són fàcilment reconeixi-bles, i de l’altra, considerant les funcions i els usos més quotidians que tenen lloc en aquest habitat-ge.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version