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The University of Southampton
Critical Practices Research Group

Dress Rehearsal

Food, Design and the City – Design Hub Barcelona

For one single day and only for one day, we (Daniel Cid, Eva Serrats, Francesc Pla) decided to test food sustainability attitudes of Barcelona.  This is why we called this project Dress Rehearsal. We did thorough a huge sustainable, popular and succulent banquet, attended by nine hundred people. And every single option of this whole endeavour had to be consistent with the principle of sustainability.  So we decided to grow lettuce locally, collected leftover bread and vegetables from markets (urban gleaning), transported the food sustainably, designed by reusing, promoted collaborative consumption, and cooked and ate food at well-served tables. The event was finally assessed according to environmental, social, nutritional, economic and logistic indexes. It was a question of highlighting the positive impact that changes in our eating behaviour can have on our lives.

The opportunity to embrace such challenge came from being appointed as guest curators of Fostering Arts and Design (FAD) in 2016, and being commissioned to prepare an exhibition at Barcelona's Design-Hub on food sustainability and design. This was when we decided that instead of holding an exhibition we would perform a street action whose design would enable us to put the city to the test and assess it.

In Dress Rehearsal we explore city needs starting from what we call ephemeral urbanism (Cid, 2014), a transitory tool for the collaborative design of the activity and the urban transformation based on cheap, reversible, recycled and recyclable soft-design resources. Using strategies belonging to ephemeral design, such as a festive gastronomic event, for instance, this way of designing seeks to reversibly test a situation. It isn't a question of designing in order to generate activity, but rather of generating a participative activity that will enable us to conceive the city from the ordinariness of the street, asserting our standing as active participants rather than mere consumers.

Dress Rehearsal was an open process based on a collaborative design project. It meant getting neighbourhood bodies and FAD to work together and involving markets, commercial streets, shops, restaurants, consume cooperatives, urban allotment gardens, schools, civic centres, research centres, activists, etc. Equipotent participants jointly defining the strategies required to harvest and cook food, as well as to obtain the necessary resources to make the event possible. The same strategy of reuse followed in the collection of leftovers was applied to the design. Nine hundred menus were served. Two hundred and thirteen volunteers took part. 96% of the waste was organic. Of the 3.06 tons of food recovered before it was thrown away, 87% was put to good use. In comparison with a standard meal, 55% less greenhouse gases were generated and the ecological footprint was reduced by 87%. The portions served were better balanced than those in a standard meal (1050 Kcal). The economic value of the food recovered amounted to €4500.

View the Dress Rehearsal web page here .

See also:

Cid, D. (2014) Ephemeral Urbanism - Urban Activities and Transformations Public Spaces: Spaces for Everyone. In Freddy Cooper et al. (ed) Creative Adjacencies - New Challenges for Architecture, Design and Urbanism. Ghent: KU Leuven, 36-43.

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Dress Rehearsal
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Dress Rehearsal
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Dress Rehearsal
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Dress Rehearsal
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Dress Rehearsal
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