URBAN TALK
June 26, 2019 | 6.00 pm | Neuer Friedhof St. Jacobi

Food, Politics, Space
How the political economy of food shapes and impacts the built environment

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes investigates the relationships between food systems and the built environment through the lens of political economy, focusing on the case of Egypt. It is based on the hypothesis that food systems and the factors that influence them at social, economical, and political levels affect architecture, urban form, and territorial organisation. The project focuses on Egypt as a paradigmatic case to examine how the food system in general and the grain chain in particular transforms and is transformed by territory. Three scales of urban and rural transformations related to sub-structures of food supply in Egypt within the last few decades are examined: state-run bakeries in a neighbourhood of central Alexandria, informal urban development on agricultural plots in Greater Cairo and the large-scale infrastructure project 'Toshka' in Upper Egypt.

Guest Professor at TU Berlin since 2018, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and contemporary scholar. Principal of the urban design practice OMNIBUS, she collaborated with Balkrishna Doshi and Rudy Ricciotti, among others. As director of MAS Urban Design at the Chair of Marc Angélil she completed a PhD from ETHZ on the effects of the political economy of food on the built environment, with a focus on Egypt. She is curator of the XII Architecture Biennale of Sao Paulo with V. Grossman and C. Miguel. She recently co-published Eileen Gray: A House under the Sun (Nobrow, London) and Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (Edition Patrick Frey, Zurich), as well as co-authored Housing Cairo: The Informal Response and Cairo Desert Cities (Berlin, Ruby Press). She is a founding member of the Parity Group, a grassroots association committed to improving gender equality in architecture.

URBAN TALK
June 26, 2019 | 6 pm

Neuer St. Jacobi Friedhof
Hermannstraße 99-105.
U 8 Hermannstraße oder Leinestraße
12051 Berlin, Neukölln