Food Cycles Pop-Up Workshop

Pop-ups have become popular in many cities all around the world, often the brainchild of local residents in an effort to improve their neighborhoods or turn derelict spaces into new community hubs. Especially connected to Food Cycle, the phenomenon of pop-up supper clubs, street foods, temporary markets, social tables, advocates a tactical urbanism approach to shorten food distribution chains, contributing to the expression of the ecological food cycles in everyday urban life.

Design, through the development of creative, circular and innovative spaces, products and services, has the potential to foster fair-access to regional food productions by enabling alternative distribution and consumption models, intertwining social and cultural processes and practices. In this regard, one of the main questions that architects, designers and creatives are called to respond is: how can we integrate spatial manifestations (temporary, moving, modular) related to flows of distribution and consumption in order to extend food awareness and food safety in urban contexts?

Food Cycles Pop-Up Workshop will investigate how design based on creativity, conviviality, sensorial experiences and augmented realities can express new interactive ways to participate in FOOD CYCLES and to enhance circular economy in urban contexts at diverse scales. We aim to develop new models of distributing, marketing, and consuming food-as well as cooking, displaying, crafting, sharing-into a collective "urban food hotspot", prototyping different concepts of a multipurpose stage able to communicate open public activities, trends, and movements and to enhance place-making effect.

Workshop participants will learn about conceive and effectively communicate innovative concepts for popup market prototypes based on instant urbanism design principles, targeted at the creation of site-specific interventions for food distribution/consumption responding to Resilient City Metabolism paradigm.