As regular readers of this irregular blog will know, I do a lot of work in the Netherlands. The Dutch, of course, have their reasons for being interested in food and cities. The first nation on earth to be predominantly urban and one of the most land-starved, they know a thing or two about intensive farming. Back in the 17th century, they pioneered many of the techniques – deep digging, heavy manuring, constant weeding, planting clover leys and fodder crops – that were later copied by the English, making the English Agricultural Revolution (and thus modern farming) possible.

Dutch tomatoes, as you possibly know, don’t taste of very much, and flying over the land at night, you can see why. It is dotted with eerily-lit rectangles: the vast greenhouses where such produce is grown for export. Since the plants are grown hydroponically, they never encounter anything so character-building as soil.

Extraordinarily, for a nation less than one seventh the size of Britain, the Netherlands is second only to the USA in terms of agricultural exports by value, being 600 per cent self-sufficient in eggs, potatoes, chicken and pork (although the latter are fed on South American grain). The drive to efficiency has left the Dutch remarkably unsentimental about their traditional rural landscape, not least because very little of it remains. Thirty years ago, the government ‘re-parcelled’ the land with a ruthlessness not witnessed in Britain since the 18th century, destroying centuries-old farms and amalgamating them into modern agri-estates.

The result, seen from the upper deck of an inter-city train, is a landscape that rolls past, for the most part, in unvarying monotony: large industrial farms, intersected by canals and interspersed with factories and compact cities. Even the cows are missing: grass-fed herds increasingly spend their lives indoors, since it is deemed more efficient to mow the grass and feed it to the animals, rather than let them wander about and nibble the stuff themselves. This approach apparently saves one cent off the price of a litre of milk. Personally, I would happily spend the extra cent for the pleasure of seeing the cows out in the fields, where they surely belong.

The interesting thing is that, like the Americans, the Dutch are starting to realise that their super-efficient, cows-in-greenhouses approach to farming may not be the best way after all. So while the search goes on for ever-more efficient methods, another search has begun for ways to bring sociability back to farming, and ‘nature’ back to the countryside. Coupled with the plain-speaking, lateral thinking, solution-seeking Dutch mentality, this makes the Netherlands one of the most interesting places I know to talk about food and cities right now.

At first, I thought it was a hoax. A news flash on the BBC announcing that all UK flights were cancelled seemed like science fiction. Five days later, of course, the entire world knows all about Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull glacier and the ash cloud that continues to block air travel over much of Europe.

The human and economic disruption has already been considerable. Millions of people have been stranded, millions of pounds of business lost, and hundreds of tonnes of perishable foods destined for Europe – such the famous Kenyan beans – destroyed. The misery and loss are real – but how much worse could it get?

Yesterday, Iceland’s president Olafur Grimsson warned that the current disruption was ‘just a small rehearsal’ for what could come. Nearby Katla, a much larger volcano close to the current eruption, is apparently overdue. It generally erupts every 40-80 years, and last did so in 1918. When Katla blows (and it is a matter of when, not if) Europe could be shrouded in ash for months. What then?

The answer could be economic and human catastrophe on a scale of which we can barely conceive. In 1783, another Icelandic volcano, Laki, erupted with such force that its poisonous fumes killed half of Iceland’s livestock, a quarter of its population, and many further deaths throughout Europe. The ash cloud, which remained for many months, altered weather patterns across the globe, creating several years of extreme weather that led to failed harvests and famine as far afield as Japan, and most famously in France (Laki is the often uncredited factor leading to the French Revolution).

Should such an eruption occur today, the availability of melon in April would be the least of our worries. The volcano is a wake-up call: a glimpse of what life might be like after Peak Oil – a reminder that the systems upon which we now rely – our just-in-time, computer-run, energy dependent, economically ‘efficient’ global networks – are as brittle as the philosophy that created them. Mother Nature is reminding us who’s boss. We should take this opportunity to listen to her.

(Photo by Ólafur Eggertsson)

This year I will be a visiting research fellow and lecturer at Wageningen University, where I will be working with Han Wiskerke, Chair of the Rural Sociology Group, to explore sitopian themes around Food and the City. Wageningen has one of the largest agriculture-based research and teaching programmes in the world, so it should be an ideal environment to test out the dilemmas and paradoxes of feeding cities. Han originally trained as a plant biologist, and I am an architect, so together we come from very different fields, but having spent two days talking with him and his colleagues, it is clear that, through food, we have found a common language. I am sure it is going to be a very fruitful collaboration, which I am looking forward to very much.

For more info on the Rural Sociology Group at Wageningen, click here

It seems a bit strange to be blogging about COP15 in the grip of the coldest winter in the northern hemisphere for decades, but, if anything, the fact that the big freeze has largely wiped the conference off the headlines has only increased the damaging consequences of what turned out to be a hugely disappointing summit. The fallout from Copenhagen has yet to be fully assessed, but, what is clear is that waiting for politicians to come to some sort of global consensus on the way forward is not, as they say in America, ‘going to get the job done’.

COP15 was ultimately a failure of vision: something few modern politicians are trained, or even expected, to possess, yet something of which we have rarely been in greater need. Fortunately, as my experience of Copenhagen proved, vision exists in abundance –it is just under the radar. For me, the greatest challenge over the coming months is to find ways of making it more visible.

I was in Copenhagen for my own event, ‘Dirt Café Sitopia’, organised together with Trine Hahnemann, chef to the Danish Parliament, and a team of collaborators (or ‘Dirties’) in Copenhagen, London and New York. The event was the latest iteration of the Dirt Café, a project started by Geoff Crook and Claire Hartten at Central St. Martins and about which I will be writing more in the coming months, but which consists, in essence, of a debate between six invited guests staged over a special meal. In this case two meals took place, in Copenhagen and New York, on the subject of sitopia (which, for those who haven’t read Hungry City, means ‘food place’).

The Copenhagen meal was held in a kolonihavehus, or allotment shed, in the suburbs of the city. The meal was cooked by Trine, and the guests included Kirsten Halsnæs, Principal Economist of the international research network on Development, Energy, and Climate Change, Thomas Harttung, whose company Aarstiderne, is the biggest organic box-scheme in the world, and whose farm in Northern Denmark is the subject of a project Green Carbon, which investigates the sequestering of carbon in farming practice. Maarten Hajer, Director of the Netherlands Environment Agency and Lene Anderson, a Danish philosopher, completed the table. Vandana Shiva, who was supposed to be joining us, was detained at the conference, but her absence didn’t spoil an amazing afternoon.

To describe the meal in detail would take as long as the meal itself, but much delicious (vegetarian) food was eaten, and the beautiful ‘landscape’ tablecloth, made by Maria Wedum, gradually came to life. The conversation ranged widely around food, cities, scale, public space, politics, and so on. A critical point was reached when Thomas spoke about his carbon neutral farm, a model he is developing that not only shows how we can feed the world organically, but create biomass and sequester carbon while we are doing it. At this, Kirsten offered to work with Thomas to bring his model to the attention of the IPCC, and those of us sitting around the table (and standing around it!) promised to do what we could to help. It was an amazing moment – a new connection forged between two people who had never met, and yet who, working together, could really make a difference.

Meeting and working with people like these gives me hope that we are not doomed to blow what may well be the most challenging decade in human history. Working together, we really can do anything. Creating the networks and frameworks that allow us to do so is our greatest challenge.

It has taken me rather longer to write about the CLEAR Village Lab than it should, partly because the event was so mentally, emotionally and physically knackering, that I spent the following week comatose. Now that my body has returned to something close to functionality, I peer at the Lab through a kaleidoscopic lens and wonder if I can do it justice. CLEAR Village, I should explain, is a Foundation recently set up by Thomas Ermacora, whose aim it is to develop a collaborative method for creating small-scale sustainable communities. I am delighted to say that Thomas has asked me to be a Thought Leader on the project, and the Lab in Barcelona was my first encounter with what that might entail. Around sixty of us spent three days in a large warehouse building, in a series of exercises and workshops designed to tease out the principles and methodologies that CLEAR will follow.

My very first encounter set the tone: partnered by Nathaniel Corum, Architecture for Humanity’s Outreach Director, we spent 90 minutes discussing questions such as ‘what is your work/life balance’, and ‘what is the place of governance in your life?’, scribbling our thoughts on a round table, along with two other couples. We then, as a table, had to debate the issues, and come up with one answer to be taken forward to the whole group. The stuff that came up in that first session was already enough to keep several philosophers going for a lifetime, so you can imagine what three days of similarly intensive work (and a suitable amount of partying) did to our brains and bodies.

Whatever else CLEAR achieves (and I hope it will be a great deal) the network of people it has already pulled together is stunning. To list them all here would take too long, but I don’t think I can recall meeting so many extraordinary, passionate people in such a short time, many of whom I very much hope will turn out to be lifelong friends and colleagues. Not bad, for three days’ work…

Last week I was the guest of the Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving (PBL), or Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency, where I was a keynote speaker at their annual conference. The English translation of PBL is actually rather misleading, since it is the result of the recent merger of two Dutch government agencies, for planning and the environment, and a closer translation would be something like the ‘Planning Bureau for the Living Environment’. Now that’s a refreshing title for a government agency: one that renders the environment, not as some remote thing we can either protect or destroy, but as something in which we already live. One that treats planning, not as some abstract chess-game, but as something inexorably bound to culture and the natural world. The PBL is headed up by Maarten Hajer, a lively and highly-respected Professor of Social Politics at the University of Amsterdam, and is staffed by a bevy of bright-eyed, bushy-tailed architect/anthropologist/philosopher polymaths. I like the Dutch. We could learn a lot from the way they do things. (As indeed, in the past, we always have…)

Last week marked the start of a new collaboration between myself and Stroom Den Haag, a two-year programme entitled Foodprint-Sitopia. Part of my own work in developing sitopia as a collaborative, conceptual and practical design tool, this will unfold as part of Stroom’s ongoing Foodprint programme, through a series of workshops and events on the theme of sitopia, culminating in a conference, exhibition and publication in December 2011.

The inaugural meeting involved many of the people with whom we will be collaborating, including those from Winy Maas’ Why Factory, Wageningen University, Oxfam Novib and the Planbureau voor de Leefomgeving.

If you are interested in getting involved, please get in touch! I will be posting more information about my broader Sitopia Project in the next few weeks.

I have just spent two days at the Eden Project, one of those rare places where simply to spend time is to feel energised and inspired. Created by the remarkable Tim Smit (whose humorous, laid-back demeanor belies his formidable drive) Eden has become symbolic of an optimistic, can-do approach to sustainability. Which made it all the more exciting to be there at Smit’s invitation, to discuss – along with an extraordinarily eclectic group of the great and good – how one might harness that can-do optimism to better effect. This latest Smit initiative – which he is calling the ‘Eden Forum’ – hopes to offer a positive narrative for the future, both by supporting local projects in the South West, and addressing the wider barriers to change – ‘to join the know-how’s to the know-who’s’, as one of the forum members, Bunker Roy, put it. Quite how the Forum is going to achieve this is unclear – but to be part of it is both exciting and an honour.

I’m delighted to say that my TED talk, given at the TEDGlobal conference at Oxford in July, has just gone live. I’m not sure whether I will be able to bear to watch it, but if you are interested, it does present most of the ideas in my book in a very time-saving 15 mins (and 15 seconds):

Carolyn’s TED talk

The publication yesterday by defra of no fewer than four reports on the question of food security in the UK is welcome proof that the government’s long-held complacency over food matters (first indicated by the publication of a series of reports including one of that title last year) is finally at an end. Debate is already raging in the media over a number of issues including GM crops, food waste, and supermarket power (the latter having also been the subject of a Competition Commission recommendation last week that a grocery ombudsman be created). At last, such issues are being given the headline treatment they deserve, as topics of vital national and global importance. One hopes that in the weeks ahead, the debate continues to broaden, rather than (as happened last year after the ‘global food crisis’ supposedly abated) fizzling out. It’s long overdue, but food’s profile is finally where it should be in the political agenda and national consciousness – long may it continue!

You can read more about defra’s reports, as well as take part in an online debate about the UK’s food in 2030 here