Sitopia
When chasing the utopian dream of an equitable, healthy and resilient society for all, architect and writer Carolyn Steel argues that we must understand the transformational power of food to usher in the good life
words – carolyn steel
location – london, england
What is a good life? The question has never been more complex. Faced with global threats such as climate change, mass extinction, population growth, wars and pandemics, we live in times of unprecedented peril. Often thanks to technological advances, we’ve created a way of life that now threatens us and our planet – a threat we fight with yet more technology.
We clearly need a reset, but where to start? Our modern way of life was built on a set of premises – cheap fuel, food and labour, unlimited resources, constant growth – that turned out to have been illusory. In the industrialised world, this can be hard to accept, since our very idea of a good life is predicated on such ‘ideals.’ Industrial capitalism depends upon these presumptions, as does our sense of our place in the world and the sort of life we think we deserve to lead.
This capitalist idea of a good life is now going global. With few exceptions [hunter gatherers are largely immune], the high-octane, urbanised, consumerist lifestyle beloved of the West has a fatal allure. The fact that such a lifestyle would be impossible to maintain for even a fraction of the projected global population is an inconvenient truth we are reluctant to address. Yet, as Earth Overshoot Day passes [the date when we were deemed to have used up a year’s worth of renewable natural resources, on August 1st 2024] the fact that we need to completely reimagine our idea of a good life becomes harder to ignore.
Our challenge is to imagine ways of life that are just as appealing as the old consumerist model, yet which everyone on the planet can enjoy. In short, we need a vision based on a totally opposite set of paradigms: zero carbon, ethical and ecological food, finite resources, a low-carbon economy and global justice. Is such a mission possible? I believe it is – and that the key to it lies in arguably our most underused transformational resource: food.
we need a vision based on a totally opposite set of paradigms: zero carbon, ethical and ecological food, finite resources, a low-carbon economy and global justice
Whether or not we realise it, we live in a world shaped by food. Our minds, bodies, homes, cities, landscapes, economies, politics, environment and climate are all affected by it. I call this food-shaped world ‘sitopia’ [from the Greek sitos, meaning food, plus topos, meaning place]. We live in sitopia, yet since we no longer value food in the modern world, we live in a bad sitopia; one so bad that it threatens our very future. Industrial food production has created the illusion of cheap food, but in reality, no such thing exists. Climate change, mass extinction, deforestation, soil erosion, pollution, diet-related disease and zoonotic pandemics are just some of the externalities of the way we now eat. And since the way we eat and the way we live are intimately connected, it follows that revaluing food is by far the most direct and comprehensive way open to us to change our lives for the better.
Sitopia is, in effect, a food-based, practical alternative to utopia. At its core is the question of how to balance society and nature; a problem that has long obsessed utopians. Plato and Aristotle addressed it when they attempted to describe an ideal city, concluding that the city should feed itself from its own hinterland to create a self- sufficient city-state, or polis. They proposed a system of oikonomia, or household management [from the Greek oikos, meaning household, plus nemein, meaning management], in which every citizen would have a house in the city and a farm in the countryside from which to feed it. Since people could eat only so much food, Aristotle argued, such an arrangement would achieve a natural balance between city and country.
The Greek ideal of oikonomia has proved remarkably enduring among utopians. Thomas More evoked it in his ‘Utopia’ of 1516, as did Ebenezer Howard with his 1902 proposal for garden cities: self-reliant, politically independent communities with close ties to the land. Both utopians imagined a world in which overgrown metropolises such as London would be replaced by a network of such regional city-states, effectively reviving the Greek polis.
In today’s globalised world, such thinking takes on new resonance. Contrary to what advertisers might have us believe, the things that matter to us most are generally primal: good health, closeness to loved ones, access to nature, strong communities, a sense of meaning – and time. Indeed, lockdown was in many ways a global experiment in living differently; although key workers were forced to risk their lives, many others discovered another way of life – simpler, slower, more resilient and locally based – they found they preferred.
Shifting permanently towards such a life presents perhaps our best chance of creating an ideal that everyone on the planet could enjoy – and food is at its heart. By revaluing food and aiming for a future in which everyone eats well, we can create a society in which meaning and enjoyment comes, not from compensatory consumption, but from primary sources.
By revaluing food, we can reset our idea of a good life and start building a flourishing future
How might this work? By internalising food’s true cost, we could create a new economy based on our most valuable shared resource, food. Regional, seasonal, organic produce would emerge as the bargain it has always been [the true costs of ‘cheap’ industrial food, as we’ve seen, are unaffordable]. This would attract more people into food and farming, revitalising the rural economy and rebalancing the relationship between city and country. Markets and high streets would flourish once more and networks of small producers would reconnect cities with their hinterlands. Farmers would be incentivised to work with nature, not against it, and industrial feedlots would be replaced by mixed-use, regenerative farms prioritising soil health, biodiversity and carbon and water capture. The food system would morph from today’s dehumanised, exploitative operation to become ecological, crafts-based and social.
Such a transformation would, of course, require land and tax reforms: the former to ensure that those who wanted access to land could have it, the latter in order to redistribute wealth in order to ensure that everyone could afford to eat well. Indeed, such reforms were part of Howard’s vision for the garden city; a detail that often gets overlooked.
However we live in the future, there is little doubt that rebalancing our lives with the natural world will be paramount to our chances of thriving. The Greek polis represents a moment in history when this principle was well understood; in order to live well in the future, we need to put the oikonomia back into our thinking. By revaluing food, we can reset our idea of a good life and start building a flourishing future. Sitopia will never be utopia, yet by harnessing food’s power for good, we can come close to the utopian dream of creating an equitable, healthy and resilient society for all.
A note: We regularly update our site as part of our efforts to reduce the environmental impact of our digital estate. The global emissions from the digital industry are on a par with those from the aviation industry, at almost 2% of total global emissions. What’s worse, this is increasing year on year. In an effort to lessen our impact, we regularly compress and archive previous features as we update our site with new content – something we consider best practice and hope to see more of across the industry. For further information, feel free to get in touch.