Edible city G-map apps, wild horses & the great hippie revival

The awareness that the city contains many domesticated and undomesticated edible plants (wild food database) which together constitute a hidden dimension of the urban landscape is growing. The awareness that it makes environmentally sense to consume these foods rather than the flown-in fruits and vegetables from the supermarket is growing as well. I watch too many cookery shows on the BBC and it sometimes seems that all English Michelin-starred chefs (and Ray Mears thrown in for good measure) are keen to incorporate foraged greens. In fact the world's top restaurant for 2010 is Noma in Copenhagen has the cardinal rule that at least one third of each dish must be foraged. Most of us (the assorted collection of 'artists' that I suppose are reading this) have a participatory sympathy for the Transition initiative. In fact, I would not be surprised if the Transition Town movement will become a major political voice around the world within the next 10 years. One of the core goals of this movement is the creation of the resources for communities (cities or otherwise) to feed themselves on locally grown food exclusively. The 'edible city', in other words, is hot property.

Swanky screenshots of the Boskoi Beta

The city is already harvested: all over town I see people purposefully picking blackberries and collecting walnuts and chestnuts that have fallen on the ground, I know that people are foraging for mushrooms for taste and for the strange things they do to your head. Anglers are surely eating their catch. These are the obvious examples of edible city foodstuffs, and these examples are probably also where the knowledge stops for most people, myself included. But there do exist people whose passion is older than the buzz and who have amassed an amazing body of knowledge, often, I suspect, through direct experimentation. 


It is fun to go out with a 'guide' and discover this n'th landscape and to learn about the unsuspected properties and uses of ordinary plants. An astonishing array of everyday 'weeds' (as you call them) are at least partly edible and it is great that people are sharing this knowledge through books, (art) projects and and through on-line services like Boskoi and Forag.rs and countless of others, this augmented foraging wiki lists almost 30 different projects. It is probably true that our grandmothers and great-grandmothers were aware of these plants both as food and for its medicinal properties. (Even though this knowledge has always been suspicious: it was the secret technology of the witch). We, who depend on an incredibly impoverished diversity of food-sources, have forgotten the variety of nature and suppressed our grazing habits. Now we must relearn this the hard way.


Typically 'collaborate free food mapping sites' critically depend on the Google.Maps backbone/interface, enabling you to find edible foodstuffs on a map and learn their uses with no effort than a double-mouse click. These services will also urge you to add your own local wild food resources to the database through a point-and-click interface. Most services will also provide (or promise to do so at some point in the future) related information like harvesting season, medical issues or recipes. However, all augmented foraging application I have seen so far disappoint when it comes down to delivering the goods: their databases are all almost empty. And even though this might of course change, I have my doubts. 

Forage.rs has the best interface but 11 annotation for the entire US is pathetic.

In a sense augmented foraging tools are a way of cheating; or better put, they seem to promise a short cut to an higher awareness where no magic portal exists. What characterizes foraging people (see earlier post) is their immensely detailed knowledge of the natural landscape, a landscape in which they are at home and in which individual has the full capacity to survive with affluence. A web 2.0 app is just another screen asking you to rely on other people's knowledge, a tunnel that tells you where to go and what you can find. It is not that augmentation cannot add additional (virtual) richness to a place but that in practise much augmentations offer a quick fix, a fatty gob, McDonalds style. I do not want another redundant layer between me and my surroundings, but I want the information that helps me read it better so I can create my own mental pop-up notes. So to speak. Sure, this is an idiotic criticism to level at these tools, (criticizing new tech is the best way to come across as grumpy, boring and out of the loop) at least at the practical level, and I am convinced that free food locating websites are a great way to learn about an important under-appreciated aspect of the city. They are teaching devices and like all teachers their influence over you must be doubted and criticized at every point. 


Unlearning is just as important as learning.   


There are already millions of G-maps applications, the technology is just monkey business. What I would like to see these services do is to step away from the gonzo-mapping model. Instead they should try to create content, to create exhaustive coverage for an area no matter how small. Collecting this data is hard work but once it is done, even when it is just for one street, it will give a much better sense of the richness of the world right under your nose than a random shatter of annotations ever will. It also makes sense as a open-source best practise: the open source projects that find the leverage to spawn an enthusiastic community are always the ones in which the project is useful from the start.


The edible city phenomena is a hippie revival because no other movement in the past (from surrealism to situationism to punk) has ever considered the production of food as politically important. That hurts.

The hippies were there before us, even though farming is a hopelessly conservative practise  

I also have to mention that my own interest for the edible city is purely intellectual. I will have to cross several mental bridges before I will be able to set myself to eat wild flowers and street grasses. I am not a horse, but I do have equestrian potential. 


There is also my proposal for Forage Mark-Up Language which is for you if you want it but will probably forever unused, which is ok. 

Small portion of Free Food Bristol map

The n'th landscape

...collecting nettles and quickleaf from the wasteland for the first infosoup

The edible city movement, if that is what it is, with their g-map applications and obscure herb recipes, gives us much to think about. At the moment I can think of only one attempt to create a theory for the edible city effort.


Listen to Wietske Maas and Matteo Pasquinelli (The City Devouring Itself: Urbanibalism in Times Insurgent Communes and Biopolitical Sieges):

The scenario of war, more than a well-regulated city ecology, forces a recognition of the overlooked nature across the urban landscape. This space is what the gardener Gilles Clément refers to as the third landscape, a ‘residue’ full of biological potential that grows between the first landscape of nature and the second landscape of man. Clement never uses the term ‘ecology’ as he prefers to stress the autonomous power of the neglected and uncultivated spaces of the environment. Yet not even in a global megalopolis is the dominion of concrete absolute. A recent example of metropolitan resistance — guerrilla gardening and seed bombing — shows how cities are not an ecosystem apart but a terrain still permeable to ‘involuntary’ vegetation.

That is spot on, though, without wanting to sound like a total dick, given that this third landscape stands between the landscapes of nature and man, it is a misnomer. The one-and-a-half landscape, the 1.1 to 1.9 landscape, the 1.01 to 1.99 landscape, would all be a better names. 

Garden joke (Ha!Ha!) by Gilles Clement

The point however I think is not that the existence of these 'mezzanine landscape', to coin another name, had remained undetected, (go ask a gardener about weed) but that they are not longer regarded as something purely negative, as a blight to be destroyed. Suddenly the 1plus-2minus landscape has become a giving landscape. This brings us back to the earlier observation that for hunter-gatherers "the land around them is their spiritual home and the source of all good things. This view is the direct antithesis of the Western Judeo-Christian perspective on the natural environment as a "wilderness"." The western distinction between man and god is a stranger to the forager as well, they do not have gods but tricksters, beings who stand somewhere between being fully human and fully divine, a being who is cunning and sly and devious but at the same time someone who teaches and has a good sense of humour; consider the Curupira. 

It's a foraged dish but I would prefer it deep-fried. 

A g-search on 'third landscape' quickly leads into another term: drosscape coined by Michael Berger and which offers an typology based on earlier work by Lars Lerup (who I met once, his book I have sold to my 2nd hand dealer). Quoting Frieze Magazine:

Drosscape’s greatest contribution lies in its speculative taxonomy of the wasted and the wasteful. Berger classifies drosscape sites into

Landscapes of dwelling  (LODs – voids of land in housing developments), 

Landscapes of transition (LOTs – temporary storage facilities),

Landscapes of infrastructure (LINs – transportation rights of way), 

Landscapes of obsolescence (LOOs – junkyards and landfills), 

Landscapes of exchange (LEXs – abandoned malls) 

and

 Landscapes of contamination (LOCOs – military bases and other brown fields).   

Sounds ok to me, up to a point because of course ends up by thinking about this landscapes as problematic areas in need of a fix. Can I stress that the Cryptoforest is not another urban design typology but an ethical proposition and that the cryptoforest is fine as it is and that the cryptoforester does not want to DO, let alone IMPROVE, anything. 


We are the first generation that will be judged by its waste rather than by its art.