The Path our Food Travels

In Hungry City, Carolyn Steele notes “One of the reasons it can be hard to appreciate the effort it takes to feed a modern city is the sheer invisibility of the process”

As architects, when we seek to understand something, we draw it. During the “Rumination” studio that Tracey and Asher taught @ubcsala in 2019 they asked students to map out the significant agricultural infrastructure within the lower mainland. The map above titled “aggregation and warehousing” was started by @jed.ca and further detailed by @jamiecheung_ at MOTIV. This effort identified road, rail and ocean/river networks, aggregation sites, food banks and hubs, and large retail chain facilities.

It is a fascinating depiction of where clusters of facilities and resources form, based on the pattern of the movement of goods. It also sheds some light on why when transportation links are broken as they were in November with the flooding in the Fraser Valley that the system breaks down.

We are curious how others think we can build resilience into the system? Seems we need to remove some of the artificial barriers of where we do and do not grow food. Allocating our food to the “far off” and paving over the soils of our cities that rely on singular umbilical chord supply routes doesn’t seem to be in our collective best interest. We could use a little more farm in the city.