The Tasty City: Democratic Life and the Education of Desire

This is the keynote lecture following the M.Arch Jury for the Landscape Urbanism Taught Postgraduate Programme

The city is a landscape built of custom and desire. The sustainable city of the future must be something for which we might have an appetite, rather than a grey, austere fate in which sacrifice is the only remaining mode of survival. Taste and appetite in the construction of everyday life and the public imagination provide a key for understanding how conceptions of utopia can be rescued from abstraction and be employed to effect real positive change in substantive landscapes. Taste and its place in organising civil society has implications for both architectural form and spatial practice, and some initial suggestions are offered for how the already existing utopian fragments in today’s cities may be knitted together.

Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is the author of The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design and editor of Landscape Citizenships with Ed Wall and Jane Wolff, Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert.