Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Food, Food Distribution Centers, Infrastructure, Markets, NAPMM, Project for Public Spaces
With thanks to Ben Vitale of the Central New York Regional Market:
I wanted to record a synopsis of my experience at the National Association of Produce Market Managers (NAPMM) Conference I just returned from in Philadelphia (more posts on this to come soon). Quickly the highlights of the conference included:
1) Meeting produce market managers from all over the country who collectively help manage the food chain that provides fresh produce for a majority of North America
2) Touring the nearly completed Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market (PWPM), a state-of-the-art 700,000 sq ft and $218,500,000 wholesale distribution center that will move from its previous Philadelphia location to this new mega-building.
3) Observing conversations amongst the various managers about the variety of market facilities they manages (architecture/operations), the major issues facing these markets, and their role in the food chain.
4) Participating in round-table discussions between NAPMM members, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA), the Project for Public Spaces (PPS), the Wallace Center, and various other interested parties, about the existing and emergent possibilities within food markets to develop what the USDA and PPS are calling ’food hubs.’ These facilities are interested in ”not only selling a wide variety of healthy foods, including local produce, but also creating a place for community-centered activities to take place like healthy clinics and day care centers.’
Given the thesis of this blog, this conference easily holds the spot most essential resource I have yet to uncover. Although it comes a few weeks late in the thesis schedule this surge of information and future contact opportunities will prove to be incredibly helpful in my explorations of the mysterious and complex architectures of the food chain.
A few photos below, much more to follow soon!
In the meantime imagine a facility, a single space, a giant refrigerator that has a bigger building foot print than all three of Philadelphia’s pro-sport stadiums, cost less than 1 of them, employees more people, and generates more income annually for the local economy. I guess I am wondering how these facilities havent entertained or captured and kept our attention. That being said perhaps now they can.
Google Earth image of the Philadelphia Wholesale Produce Market
View of the market's 1300 foot-long central concourse
View back to Philadelphia from a market window
Photo from the floor of the central concourse
NAPMM members touring the cooled storage rooms
Exterior view of the 'backside" docking facades of the market
Workshop sessions with NAPMM, USDA, PPS, and the Wallace Center.
Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: Farms, Food, Food Distribution Centers, Infrastructure
While foodscapes such as thisWisconsin dairy farm still exist and are still productive this is not the landscape feeding urban society. The forces of modernity and industrialization that have created our burgeoning population have also responded for our need for exponentially more food. The modern city made of modern men rely on modern foodscapes for further development, yet we are also dependent on their disappearance. Food has been removed to urban hinterlands or cloaked in corrugated mega-box warehouses, removed from our daily lives to avoid disruption, ensure control. Fundamentally urban, extreme, but essential, these are the spaces of modern food:
Filed under: videos | Tags: Food, Food Distribution Centers, Great Britain, Infrastructure, video
While the supermarket (the first ever is the delightfully named Piggly Wiggly) was invented in America in 1916, its growth over the last century is dwarfed by the growth of supermarkets in some other western countries such as Great Britain. Across the pond, the supermarket was introduced in 1951 and its hold on this much smaller food producing country has become much more significant given the Britain’s reliance on food imports.
While in America we are slightly closer to a balance between supermarkets, smaller stores, and public markets, in Britain over 80% of food consumed in households is from a supermarket. Like the food distribution centers that sell to markets, smaller grocers, and restaurants, major supermarkets such as Walmart, Tescos, Costcos, and Sainsbury’s have recently begun consolidating there food distribution through their own distribution centers. Moving more towards vertical integration, supermarkets are also beginning to hold dominion over some of the farmers and food processing companies that stock their shelves.
The video below from the BBC’s series Britain From Above takes a look at the massive and complex spaces and logistics of supermarket food distribution in Great Britain. In many ways, this system is much more technologically advanced and efficient, but one must question the need for privacy towards efficiency vs. the need for the public’s national, regional, and local food sovereignty (the right of peoples to define their own food).
Filed under: Books, Crisis City, Pecha Kucha | Tags: Books, Ecological Urbanism, Infrastructure
While the first few slides are well annotated, the second part of the presentation consists mostly of scans from the book at which I intended to provide a verbal narration.
I begin this section of the presentation highlighting an article by Rem Koolhaas entitled: Advancement vs Apocalypse.
Following that is the entirety of an article by Pierre Belanger entitled “Redefining Infrastructure”. I would argue this is an essential read for Nilus’ thesis as well as Crisis City as a whole. It has some rich moments, but it gives an excellent summation of the history of infrastructure in America and how it has been drive by or relates to politics, economics, etc. Additionally it includes some incredible visuals.
The following scans were included as provocations for other Crisis City members to alert them to some relevant articles in this anthology.
Finally I conclude with some imagery that I find exciting or provocative. Beyond text, this book is packed with experimental and effective visuals.
The presentation concludes with the entirety of a manifesto entitled “Revolutionizing Architecture” that was presented at the 11th International Architecture Exhibition at the Venice Biennale.
The point of all this of course is to assert that Ecological Urbanism is well aligned with many of the interests of Crisis City and it will serve as a useful resource in our endeavors.
Needless to say when this cover caught my eye I had to take a look, a cellphone tower/palm tree, talk about multi-purpose. What sold me on this book though was the back cover:
“Once the greatest American example of a modern city served by infrastructure, Los Angeles is now in perpetual crisis,”
Wow right! Infrastructural Modern>Perpetual Crisis, quite a serious claim. Luckily the contents of the book matched the covers intellectual promise. First off, the table of contents, graphically establishing the order of the collection of articles this book contains. There are three primary sections:
LANDSCAPE:
Owens Lake
Los Angeles River Watershed
Oil
Gravel
FABRIC:
Traffic
Telecommunications
Landscape (principally palm trees)
Mobile Phones
OBJECTS:
Property
Distribution
Props
PICTURING LOS ANGELES: THE LINEAR CITY
The River
The Street
The Trench
While each articles is written by a different source, they are held tightly together, almost like a catalog of Los Angeles uniquely absurd infrastructural systems. I like the brilliance of its organization. Seeing the cityscape as a landscape (natural fabric), a fabric (man-made landscape), and objects (the things scattered across the landscape/fabric).
In a generalist sort of way the book can be summed up as follows:
Los Angeles as a city never should have existed, and certainly never should have grown (for lack of water alone). However, Los Angeles history is one of crisis, and subsequent infrastructural fixes. While this book is a history of those fixes, it is also projective in that it forecasts the exhausting of theses infrastructural fixes. How will the city respond to the next crisis and when will it have one fix to many?
More on some of the books grandest gems including to come:
1) The Alameda Corridor: express to the east. 2) The Los Angeles (River) 3) Gravel Pits of Irwindale: a city spread out across the country 4) Palm Trees: armature of oasis
Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, edited by Kazys Varnelis, is a publication of The Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University and The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Check the book out!
