MetaboliCity – Urban growers

MetaboliCity is the name for a vision of a city that metabolises its resources and waste to supply its inhabitants with all the nourishment they need and more.As a participatory design research project it explores how designers can intervene sensitively within local urban food growing cultures by providing a design thinking and crafting that may help to sustain these initiatives and catalyse larger positive changes in the surrounding environment.

The team has installed urban grow-kits accompanied by a set of guidelines to be tested and developed at a broad sample of communities in London, UK and Brussels, Belgium. This is a design-service system that integrates both traditional and hi-tech industrialized agricultural techniques into the fabric of the built environment whilst simultaneously being rooted in an ethical systems thinking.