AA Milan Visiting School - CyberGARDENING the city

As the world’s population grows at an ever faster pace and the effects of global warming threaten crops worldwide, the global reserve of food is reaching an historic low. Global metropolis like Milan will soon find themselves in a condition of shortage, perhaps not dissimilar to the one experienced in the past in periods of war or siege, where food and energy were either absent or unaffordable to the majority.

Philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli claims that it is in this periods that the culinary art has demonstrated its ability to expand the horizons of edibility by reinventing the urban landscape as a potentially productive one; in periods of shortages the art of cultivating the nutritious potentials of what Gilles Clement calls the “third landscape” elevated itself to a gastro-political art of resistance towards the enemy and of building a new collective identity.

Such practice posses a radical attitude that goes far beyond the current fashion for urban allotment and farmer markets in the sense that has the capability to reinvent our perception of those interstitial ecologies that are ubiquitous in our metropolis but that escape categorisations, as they are not part of the urban techno-sphere nor they belong to the agricultural layer; they exist within out of control, invisible or neglected strata where nature escapes human control and proliferates unchecked.

This year the AA Milan will set up its urban Lab in the Milanese borough of Nil28 and will embrace this radical attitude to propose scenarios of gastro-political resistance towards the tyranny of large multinational food distributions, the classism of organic gourmet food and the threat of global supply shortage.

more on: http://cybergardens2013.aaschool.ac.uk/