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

Last week I gave a talk at TEDGlobal, the Oxford-based version of the international ideas conference dubbed the ‘Davos of the Mind’. TED (which stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a truly extraordinary phenomenon, bringing together lateral thinkers, movers and shakers from all corners of life, putting them together for a week and seeing what happens. Speakers this year included Alain de Botton, Gordon Brown, Rory Bremner, as well as the director of the world’s biggest fusion reactor, the astrophysicist who proved there is a black hole at the core of our galaxy, and the neuroscientist who has discovered the part of our brain that makes moral judgments. But the amazing thing about TED is that you not only listen to people speak, you get to have dinner with them too – I chatted to all of the above over the course of the week, (apart from GB, who arrived and departed with unTED-like haste). After a week like that, many people apparently experience a TED-Crash, but I must admit I am still on a TED High. It really was the most extraordinary experience. I am still pinching myself.

You can read a summary of my TED talk on the Guardian digi-blog here

The recent collapse of Dairy Farmers of Britain (DFB), one of the country’s largest dairy co-operatives, has left 400 small dairy farmers in some of Britain’s most beautiful rural areas struggling to survive. The farmers, based mainly in Yorkshire, Cumbria and Lancashire, must now either find alternative buyers for their milk in an already saturated commodity market, or receive 10p a litre for their milk – less than half the cost of production. As choices go, it is a double-Hobson, since neither option is likely to result in the farms’ survival.

DFB’s demise comes at a time when growing sections of society, from eco- and political groups to social movements such as Transition Towns, are waking up to the fact that such local networks are bound to play a crucial role in our future adaptability. Quite apart from their value in addressing the many-headed monster we face in the shape of climate change, population growth and peak-everything, such infrastructures represent the warp and weft of society without which further resilience is useless. Far from letting such networks go to the wall, we should be redoubling our efforts, not just to preserve them, but to augment and replicate them.

No political speech today is devoid of references to community, sustainability, and the desirability of nurturing both. But to state such aims without addressing the hidden obstacles lying in their path is nonsensical. The demise of small and medium-scale dairy farming in Britain is just one example of our failure to recognise the value of local economies, or the damage that global market forces have wrought on them. Our ability to effect social change has been paralysed, because the intellectual, commercial and political elements of our society are hopelessly out of kilter.

Which is where architects have a vital role to play. We architects are forever drawing visions of a better world, imagining the structures and processes that might bring them about. Now we must employ our spatial imaginations and lateral thinking, not just to describe possible future worlds, but to critique existing ones. We must use our skills to expose the invisible structures that truly shape our world and so often block our capacity to act: the political and economic power-lines, rules and regulations, patterns of ownership, denials and opacity. Only then will we meet the true design challenge of our times: to create a synthetic vision of a future society in an era of unprecedented complexity.

To a casual visitor holidaying in the Yorkshire Dales this summer, the absence of a herd of cows contentedly chewing the cud in a nearby field may seem (if noticed at all) mildly saddening. Milk, sold at eight times what the farmers were paid for it, will no doubt be for sale on supermarket shelves. But something of immense value to the region will have been lost. Twenty years from now, who knows? It may not just be the absence of cows, but the absence of milk itself, that is in question. Then people might start to take a bit more notice – but then, it will be too late. If we are to build a resilient society capable of withstanding future shocks, we must act now. Preserving local networks like DFB is not a luxury, it is a necessity.