STOCKING THE CITY
STATEMENT OF INTENT CONTEXT Infrastructure has reemerged in recent design discourse as a means for reading and diagramming the contemporary city.1 Of the essential infrastructural systems that support cities, (including water, air, energy, communication, transportation, and waste services) food systems not only combine many elements of the other systems, but also connect to the particularities of culture. Pierre Belanger describes systems of food production and agriculture as “the fundamental infrastructures that hold cultures together and sustain (or cease) the longevity of regions. These are spatial, they provide sustenance and form an ecology that generates exchanges, markets, and economies.”2 While the production and distribution of food (like other infrastructure) occurs largely outside public consciousness, growing consumer demand for local food has influenced the increasing scrutiny of global industrial agriculture and the space of retail markets.3 Public urban markets, which served as strategic food distribution centers in many American cities until WWII (often doubling as civic or transportation hubs and urban gathering places) were increasingly abandoned as refrigeration technologies, highway infrastructure and modernist planning principles paved the way for supermarkets to usurp the ‘traditional’ role of public markets in everyday life. Carolyn Steele has argued that surviving public markets “bring a quality of urban life that is all too rare in the West: a sense of belonging, engagement, character. They connect us to an ancient sort of public life.”4 While some have dismissed this sensibility as “sentimental”5 , I will argue that the existing global system of industrial food production and distribution is no longer viable given the relationship between this system and greenhouse gas emissions, fossil fuel shortages, obesity, urban sprawl and population influxes, and limited accessibility to food of nutritional value (all of which are produced by global capitalism).6