Creative Urban Farming Workshop | BARCELONA, SPAIN Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalunya

Creative Urban Farming Workshop | BARCELONA, SPAIN Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalunya

Today, we have accessibility to products coming from anywhere in the world, all year round. However, it is questionable whether the quality of these products is healthy, and whether the process to produce and distribute them is sustainable, as food production and distribution involves a complex set of economic activities, exchanges (digital and physical) and human behaviors that all sharply affect the living conditions of the planet and its inhabitants. Moreover, there is a growing recognition that food is not only meant to feed us from a nutritional point of view, as it creates also relations referring to the social and cultural perspective, for example, conviviality and feeling of belonging.Design, through the development of creative and innovative products and services, has the potential to enhance and boost sustainable food production and distribution, and food related 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 food production and distribution in urban environment, enhancing participatory processes?Creative Urban Farming Workshop will investigate how design, based on creativity and new technologies, can help to boost participatory food production in urban environment in a pro-active and productive way, and through diverse scales. We aim to develop innovative urban food production systems prototypes, sharing knowledge with citizens, architects, designers and artists on how to build creative cultivation systems. Workshop participants will learn about digital fabrication targeted at the creation of site-specific prototypes for food production, responding to local environmental, social and economic conditions. Each participant group will realize one 1:1 scale prototype for food production in the urban environment.The participation to the Creative Urban Farming Workshop is free of charge.The Creative Urban Farming Workshop is part of the Creative Food Cycles (CFC) project co-founded by the Creative Europe Programme of European Union.The workshop is lead by IAAC Barcelona and supported by LUH Hannover and UNIGE Genova.