Food and Megalopolis

Food and Megalopolis Symposium of Gastronomy Sydney 1996 Alan told me that the area that might receive the least attention at this symposium was the future. In fact I think we’ve talked about the future a great deal at least by implication. I have got the sense that we mostly share an urgency about certain environmental issues that have a strong bearing on gastronomy and I’m going to be part of the group concentrating on the power relations that inform agriculture, sustainability, and in this case, the urban landscape. So as a part of the discussion of food and power I want to talk about some aspects of the role food could play in ensuring a sustainable future for convivial urban life. For me this is absolutely a question of political power relations. And its a topic that does, I think, follow on from some things said by other speakers and participants in developing themes about location, ecology and sustainable food production around cities in the face of agribusiness and an increasingly global economy. First of all I want to share a few facts about city growth. By understanding what is going to happen to cities, it is also possible to define who will have the power to affect that process, and thus to shape food production and consumption arrangements for all of us into the 21st century. Potentially unsustainable levels of population growth within the next fifty to one hundred years are forecast to be concentrated within vast urbanised regions stretching across much of the globe. These regions have been given many names among which are: megacities megalumps technoburbs megalopolis heterotopia the fully urbanised region the non place urban realm the high tech growth pole and the softopolis Page 1 There are many more. But whatever they are called, its likely that these huge urban conurbations will follow a similar trajectory, growing into even bigger megalopoli which will finally interconnect into still larger megalopolitan networks of urbanised regions across many of the earth’s coastal strips and inland plains. But while size matters, it is not just a question of the dimensions but of the shape of what is emerging that is of concern. A new kind of city is forming. Already up to 86% of the population of the USA lives in such “post urban” regions (Gottdiener, 1994), edge cities without traditional centres or urban functions that are often literally closed communities; residential enclaves with locked gates patrolled by guards and off limits to those who can’t afford to buy in. In this “post modern kitschscape” (Wilson, 1991) suburban expansion expresses a paradigm shift; invoking an urbanism without producing a city (Sorkin, 1992). Already we have seen this process operating in Australia as autonomous regions centred on megamalls replace city centres which have not only lost their dominant role in many regional economies but may, in certain regions, disappear altogether (Gottdiener,1994). As megalopolis becomes the world’s dominant settlement form the fear is that its development may be linked to a "crisis of place" representing the end of any direct connection perceived between personal wellbeing and the physical environment. Peter Calthorpe (1993, 11) has described this process succinctly in an American context: “The placeless evolution of the suburban megalopolis is the inevitable and desirable expression of our new technologies and hyper-individualized culture”. And this urban future gives rise to a number of food related anxieties: the debilitating environmental effects of rapid and uneven economic development across cities, regions and nation states; the implications of unconstrained urban expansion on fringe agriculture, the emergence of increasingly polarised communities in cultural, economic, environmental and gastronomic terms; and the decline of the civic realm. There isn’t time today to get into the part played by the car, or of information technologies, in shaping the gastronomic results of this process of urban transformation. Suffice it to say both preferred transport forms and evolving communications technologies have a powerful role, among other things, in hastening the decline of the traditional centre and thus the public realm; elements of cities that have been up to now critical to a vibrant, sustainable food culture. But what I do want to spend a little time on is the political and especially the economic power relations that govern the interaction between this vast urban growth, agriculture and the countryside because this is one of the key sites for urban gastronomy in future. Its already well known that urban incursion into the city's regional surrounds is a serious environmental problem but one that expresses seemingly intractable power relations, driven, in gastronomic terms, by skewed, Page 2 even irrational economic values and priorities. In many places it seems that urban expansion is pursued by governments, developers and business interests apparently in contradiction to broader regional food health. It is fairly evident that, as far as much of our food production is concerned, a perverse energy system is in operation in which resources are taken from the country, through industrialised agriculture occurring at huge environmental cost, exploited for city needs and then expelled as waste into a hinterland constituting a polluted sink for urban excess. In failing to maintain a community of interest with the countryside, in pursuing an ethic of constant growth, urban development has not only powerfully emphasised the artificiality of the city, but allowed the sense of stewardship towards the land to decline. Yesterday and on Thursday the agricultural scientists and the nutritionists gave us a frightening glimpse of an anti gastronomic world in which “the real confrontations with nature take place in the laboratory and factory, and the natural landscape is increasingly sanitised” (Ravetz, 1986, 125). Paradoxically it may be that in spatial terms, “As agriculture becomes increasingly industrialised, a lover of the countryside in the future will be more likely to find it in the old city and its fringe than in the land beyond” (Simmonds, 1993, 101). I don't look forward to the brave new world of functional foods. I fervently hope that the technical fixes that fail to address real gastronomic issues and concerns can as much as possible be avoided but to do that we need to seize back power over our future. Moreover we need to conceptualise what exactly it is that we want to do with our urban and rural resources, and how best we can direct our actions towards a more environmentally and gastronomically informed production and planning. A Canadian ecologist, William Rees, has developed an important tool in this work: the notion of the ecological footprint, to try to define the carrying capacity of regions in food production and consumption terms. Where a place has an ecological footprint bigger than its geographical region it is appropriating some other place’s carrying capacity. In other words it is taking more than its share of resources and producing more than its share of waste. The power of the developed world in food production terms has been the power to appropriate capacity and to export the environmental consequences to other places and to the future. This is why a place like the Netherlands, understood in the context of traditional economic measures like GDP to be a marvel of productivity and cheapness, is in fact a supremely costly ecological disaster for the rest of us and for the future. Its why the cost benefit analysis of economists which says that private allotments, or as they are officially known community leisure gardens, (Don, The Observer, 17.3.1996) are expensive to run, is wrong. Its perhaps no surprise either that unsustainable Dutch agricultural methods produce tasteless food while vegetables from allotments taste good. To get back to cities, the problem is that food production arrangements within supposedly advanced systems perpetuate an apparently cost free urban expansion in which there is no clear nexus between use of resources and their finite nature, or between polluting practices and damaging effects (Hough, 1984). The attitudes that Page 3 underlie unsustainable approaches to food production reflect the way in which our dominant view of landscape has become detached from notions of ecology. In most Australian cities the adverse signs are all around for those who wish to look: -loss of market gardens, -decline of small centres on the urban fringe, -long distance shipping of vegetables to urban markets, -gardens devoted to conspicuous consumption of leisure as a status good, -soil erosion/land degradation, and -storm water runoff and effluent pollution. City growth has built over the open spaces necessary for private vegetable gardens; public green space is unproductive and energy profligate; and agricultural production technologies used for urban fringe production are wasteful, polluting and finally unsustainable. In broader terms, we have yet to come to grips with the implications of resource depletion, land degradation, toxins in the food chain, the energy waste of farming for animal protein to overfeed the north and stockpile that overproduction, in a context of mass malnourishment and starvation in the south. It is tempting to believe that we continue this contrary pattern of urban growth and agricultural profligacy because we are without a sense of the adverse consequences, in turn without this consciousness because ill effects are not yet sufficiently pronounced in our personal lives. This is known as the problem of lag times and it is a key issue in many areas of urban ecology. So what can be done about all this? I suggest that how we deal with city edges - the rural urban fringe - is critical to rethinking these unsustainable approaches. The importance of these peripheral areas for ecology, agriculture and our future gastronomic health is often undervalued and I think there are some important reasons for this.

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