Carolyn Steel

Architect, Change Agent, Connector, Designer, Educator/Teacher, Environmentalist, Foodie, Idea generator, Musician, Writer/Editor

Carolyn Steel is an award-winning architect, writer and lecturer. Her work has focused on the everyday lives of cities and the role of food in shaping them. She has run successful design units at the London School of Economics, London Metropolitan University and Cambridge University, where her lecture series Food and the City is an established part of the architectural degree programme. In 1995-6 she was a Rome Scholar, researching the Mundane Order of the City. A director of Cullum and Nightingale Architects, she has completed several major buildings for the Central School of Speech and Drama. Her media work includes presenting on BBC TV’s 'One Foot in the Past', and she is a regular columnist for Building Design. Her first book, Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives, was published by Chatto and Windus in 2008, winning the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction. In 2008 she was featured in a special edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Food Programme, and in 2009 was profiled by the Ecologist magazine as one of the UK’s top ten ‘21st Century Visionaries’.

Food and its capacity to connect, the question of what is a good life, cities, society, scale, synthetic thinking, communicating, interpreting, simple joys, words, singing, dreaming

Feeding cities is a great challenge of our time. The process has a larger social and physical impact on us and our planet than anything else we do, yet few of us are aware of it. Industrialisation has distanced us from the effort required and made feeding cities seem easy. But in an era of climate change, peak oil and a rapidly growing urban population, that illusion is wearing off. We urgently need a new model for human dwelling – one that recognises the interdependence of city and country, and treats them as a single, organic whole. My proposal is a new concept that could lead to such a model: sitopia (from the ancient Greek sitos, food + topos, place). Sitopia is ‘food place’: a way of seeing that acknowledges food’s centrality in our lives and its power to shape us and our world. Food is our greatest shared need – which makes it our greatest potential asset. If we recognise its power to connect, we can harness it as a tool to the shape the world for the better.

TED has changed my life in ways I could not have imagined.

Singing, cooking, empathising, communicating