Terreform in PLOT Volume 8

“Designing for Re-Engtanglement” by Terreform was recently published in PLOT Volume 8: Cookbook. The essay derives from forthcoming Urban Research book Home Grown.

As designers and planners, our natural impulse is to seek out metrics for quantitative improvement wherever we work, but acting on that motivation often cause us to overestimate the importance of the built environment and underestimate its context. Like the sanitary mapping of 1865 that sought to link environmental nuisances with public health, today’s mapping treats food environments as abstract territory rather than lived space and misses opportunities to leverage these systems within broader city policies and funding streams.

In Home Grown, we are proposing strategies that re-entangle food with broader planning and design goals to connect with other facets of the city metabolism not through the universal development of completely closed loop systems, but rather by reimagining food as a public utility supported by greater university investment that forges connections both locally and in the greater region.

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Cover Photo PLOT Vol 8: Cookbook is Beef Tartare by Emma Bessel.

PLOT is the annual student-edited journal of the Landscape Architecture Program of the Spitzer School of Architecture at The City College of New York. The journal is guest edited and coordinated by Michael King and Associate Professor Denise Hoffman Brandt and designed by Isaac Gertman. Last year, PLOT received the 2018 Douglas Haskell Award for Student Journals from the Center for Architecture.