Taste and appetite in the construction of everyday life and the public imagination provide the key for understanding how conceptions of utopia can be rescued from abstraction and be employed to effect real positive change in our landscapes. This seminar explores the construction of the city as an environment built of custom and desire, and how our hopes for the sustainable city of the future must be couched in terms of a delicious future for which we might have an appetite, rather than a grey, austere one in which sacrifice is the only remaining mode of survival. An awareness of taste and its place in organizing civil society has implications for both architectural form and spatial practice, and some initial suggestions for how we may begin to knit together the already existing utopian fragments in today’s cities are offered.

Tim Waterman is Senior Lecturer and Landscape Architecture Theory Coordinator at the University of Greenwich, a tutor at the Bartlett, UCL, and Research Associate for Landscape and Commons at the digital arts collective Furtherfield. He is the author of two textbooks on landscape architecture and is currently working on two co-edited volumes, Landscape and Agency, with Ed Wall (forthcoming Routledge 2016) and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food, with Josh Zeunert (forthcoming 2017). He is interested in how people form imaginative understandings of urban cultural landscapes in everyday life. This forms the basis for other explorations of power and democracy and their shaping of public space and public life; taste, etiquette, belief and ritual; and foodways in community and civic life and landscape.

This is a FREE event but registration is highly recommmended. Go to Eventbrite to register.