Urban appetite is not a political utopia, but a necessity for the inhabitation of any city.
urban anorexia: about the void.
When a city looses its appetite, the energy flow between the urban, architectural and
social structures slows down.
Famine is eating nothing because there is no food. Dieting
is eating less as a self-imposed verdict.
Anorexia
is
eating nothing even though there
is plenty of food.
After the fat years of Manchester and Liverpool’s textile boom in the 19th century, 20th
century deindustrialization
went hand-in-hand with suburbanization. Then came the crisis
with the depopulation of urban areas.
This sequence
resembles a feast followed first by
a famine and then a low-calorie diet which has turned into anorexia.
urban appetite: about motivations and actions.
Claiming that the city is anorexic implies that what is missing is not "food" but a motivation
to eat, or to consume
the
urban environment. What are urban desires - beyond punk,
gentrification or shopping?
This project for the city of Manchester proposes crossover space capsules. Displacement
of urban space is used
as a means of amplifying differences. Such urban therapy, by
scrutinizing existing conditions,
aims at
triggering
lingering, idle and unforeseen appetites.
In order to increase the flow of urban communication,
the project captures
remains within
the vacuum of the voids, which after their displacement to another area of the city act like
magnets
and trigger and trigger appetite for the New, the Old and the Unexpected.
Project credits: Sabine von Fischer & Judith Weik, 2004
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