Starting with the Kitchen

In order to rethink and transform urban local food systems, the kitchen is a good place to start. Even in the highly commodified urban food system of a city like Ghent, the kitchen entertains a strong relation of proximity to the places where food is eaten. This is true for the individual kitchens at home, but it also applies to collective kitchen infrastructure such as restaurants and institutional kitchens. The kitchen is not only the place where food is prepared, it is also a place in which logics of consumption and production meet. This also makes the kitchen a place of potential solidarity between producers and consumers. In this advanced topic we explore the agroecological transformation of neighbourhood food systems through the perspective of the community kitchen in the Bloemekenswijk in Ghent. While historically part of the periphery of Ghent, the Bloemekenswijk is today subject to new dynamics of urbanization that reposition the neighbourhood within the urban agglomeration and set up a new dialogue between local and supra local relations. This provides an opportunity to reflect on the role of neighbourhood infrastructure in general and food infrastructure in particular. The neighbourhood contains an array of existing food initiatives that can be the starting point of an agroecological transformation of the food system. The focus will be in particular on the Bloemekenswijk, however, initiatives in other neighbourhoods will be documented as well. This approach has been systematized within the online resource. Particularly relevant is the building block of the landed community kitchen. This Advanced Topic builds on the results of last year’s topic on publicly owned farmland the results of which have been gathered in the following online film.