Anna Marie Fisker_ Nature at ground zero


Hypothesis. 
In community building, the third place is the social surroundings separated from the usual two social environments of home (first place) and the workplace (second place). These “third places” as the Urban Sociologist Ray Oldenburg calls them, gives opportunity for people to connect and bond despite class, age, gender etc.
It is estimated that by 2050 up to 70% of the world’s population will be living in urban areas. Urbanization affects human health and well-being through factors such as exposure to pollutants, including noise, disasters, stress and diseases, urban density, lack of physical activity, degraded ecosystems and erosion of natural capital. However, today local agriculture and urban food spaces have been rediscovered, a movement that has brought more social interaction into the public sphere. People join each other in public spaces when buying groceries, eating out in restaurants or even meeting up for creating new green space for growing food right there in the city. Food connects people. It creates room for meeting up with people you know, but also with people you do not know – and creates new interactions and relationships – it makes people bond.

Objectives.
The workshop “Food + the City” will be the ambit where these transformations will boost the construction of a new agenda for the area “Ground Zero”. Food + the City focuses, among other things, on the blurred lines between public and private, inside and out, new and old. Furthermore, it is user-centered and focuses on architectural planning as a tool to redevelop the city area; the city understood as the ideal laboratory to test this notion.

Exercise.
The Lorenteggio district is facing these problems, and we have to consider whom do we develop for? What do we want with the area? Do we want to oppose the physical and social decay, and serve existing inhabitants, businesses etc. or do we want a different clientele?
The project aim to incorporate new programs by opening up to possibilities. Our aim is through food and food-scapes to facilitate the appearance of unexpected uses and social groupings.

Anna Marie Fisker_Biography

Anna Marie Fisker, Architect maa, PhD, Professor at Department of Civil Engineering, Aalborg University, Denmark. She graduated from School of Architecture in Aarhus, and has studied at the Design School in Kolding.
Anna Marie Fisker currently holds the position as director of Center for Food Science, Design & Experience at Aalborg University. Her research focuses on issues of architectural theory and history, design, food and aesthetics with a protracted curriculum in teaching in these subjects. Anna Marie Fisker has been curator at several Art and Architectural Biennale projects in Venice and has a large curriculum of external financed research projects related to design, architecture and food and is the author of more than 100 scientific articles.