Fredmeyer hypermarkets in USA (1)

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Our society has an addiction to accessibi l ity. In our developed countr ies everything is accessible at any moment and for any price. Internet is accessible everywhere for free, in the middle of the winter you can buy summer fruits , for f ifty euros you can fl ight through the whole world.But this system doesn’t work anymore. It is proved by the economic and ecologic cr is is . To change it , many solutions are already found, but they propose very extreme changes. People are used to their way of l iving. If we want to pro-pose any solutions, it have to be adapted to our actual ac-cessibi l ity addiction, to step by step get to an other system. We need a transit ion step. A first «in-between» solution.

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Because of the growth of the population, cit ies gonna be our main environment in the future. Any changes we want to make has to be think within a urban environment. Lot of solutions can be found in the organisation of our cit ies. I wil l mainly focus on the food system and the mobil ity.

By l iving in cit ies, we behave as if we do not be-long to the natural world. With our food system it is the food which come to us and not us who are making the effort to feed ourselves.

A first weak point in our system is our cheap food. A great system because it permits to everybody to buy anything. It is so attractive that nobody paid attention to how it is produce, and what is real ly cheap food. Currently the system has been pointed by few proofs of the extreme bad qual ity of these products. . The solutions which has be found are comsumption of organic products, system of local food, which is also retur-ning to simple farming. But our cit ies are far too big to be fed by natural farming. An other solution would be to make food a bit more expensive. Then people would pay more attention of what they eat and the qual ity could be better . But in smal l towns in the middle of France for example, lower class famil ies are happy to buy meat for two euros. And even if they know what kind of bad qual ity it is , they wil l st i l l buy it , because they want to feed their chi ldren with a minimum of meat. We cannot go back to «poor people eat bread, r ich people eat meat». Nobody wil l be interesting in it . We need

Mutatoes (2)

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to find the balance.

Revolutionis ing l iving standards for city dwellers , the ready made food is a very important food system. People want to eat fast , cheap and good. And it is possible nowa-days. But it comes out of an industr ia l food system which cannot stay l ike it is . The fact is that we can’t say to these people, okay from now you have to go to the market the sunday morning, buy organic vegetables and cook it at home. If they buy ready made food it ’s because they don’t want or don’t have time to do that. So yes for sure, we should eat local , we should buy to the farmers, we should cook in a beautiful kit-chen a wonderful meal . But this idea doesn’t match with the everybody’s l ife. We should find a solution to use local food to prepare sandwiches and other fast meals in the streets. Develop the catering instead of developping the fast foods for example. It ’s gonna be a bit more expensive, but raise the prices should not be a problem. If we raise the price of food, it means that we change the whole food system. More farming means more farmers. We can create more jobs around the cit ies to produce what they eat within the city. Then lower class famil ies sti l l could buy some meat, because they would have jobs, and buy for cheap price the left over pieces of meat or the not so red tomatoes.

An other fact which has to change in our urbanisa-tion is the mobil ity. In our actual cit ies, activites are mainly condensed in the center. Inhabitants always have to move from their distr ict to the center for anything; job, groceries,

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shopping, services, culture. . . The architect Douwe Jan Joustra (4) suggests to focus on the l ife conditions of every distr icts and suburbs in sort of their inhabitants would not need anymore to go to city center. In the visual essay «Scramble City» (1) they com-pare cit ies in which the center is condensed to fr ied eggs. A better solution would be a city looking l ike scrambled eggs, with some center of attentions dispatch everywhere through the city. To solve this problem we should first develop much more the publ ic transportations, to save at least the impact of the individual transportation. Then in a second time we should review the composit ions of the cit ies, to try to make every disctr it independants.

An other solution for the mobil ity is internet. It is a good way to organize our l ives. Douwe Jan Joustra has an example with the concept of working at home (4) . We can think working areas in an other way. Working spaces are essentia l only for production works, but for economic acti-vit ies for example, we don’t need a commun office. People can work at home and share their work on internet. It can solve a lot the mobil ity issue. . . but not the social one. We l ive in a digital age. Internet and high techno-logies products are for sure the source of our accessibi l ity addiction. A dai ly l ife with an Iphone is now too much com-fortable and common to throw them away. We found a lot of hope in using high technologies and internet to l ive in a more eco-fr iendly way, because e-mai l save more paper than post-mai l , Iphone’s cameras save a massive production

Endcommercial (3)

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of pockets cameras, etc. Many functions integrate in one same object is very useful , a lso because it save place for housing, which gonna be smal ler and smal ler with the growth of the population. But the question is : how ecofriendly is an Iphone? how eco-fr iendly is internet? Few researches prove that indeed internet has an impact on the environment. Using internet is using electr i-city, and each google research is a C02 emission. Companies already found some ways to bui ld data centers with more environmental respect. But a question is raised that r ight now internet consumption doesn’t cause any trouble, because less than half of the planet is using it . But in ten years it should be one third more of the world with a dai ly use of internet. And here is the r isk to feel much more the impact of internet on the environment. Use internet to reduce our waste nowadays is in-deed a solution, but it ’s not the ult imate solution. We have to go back to the essentia l . We have to re-duce our addiction, to remember what are our basics needs, what is fundamental in our l ife. The movement Slow Design, for example, reveals spaces and experiences in everyday l ife that are often missed or forgotten. Their processes are “open source” and col laborative, relying on shar ing, co-operation and transpa-rency of information. The writer Henri David Thoreau in 1854 (3) already tend to go back to the essentia l , to have a simple l ife focus on nature and well being. These notions begin to be present, but sti l l through the cosumption society.

Amazingness (4)

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If there is one thing we need to change first , it is the education. It is the solution to influence the society and make a change. We have to educate the future generations in a different way. It ’s a good way to integrate a new way of thinking, of l iving, of behaving. It ’s not about educate them how works the world now, but how should work the world, and how it should be later . We have to give them a more open-minded education, with hope and possibi l ites.

Humans need to gather to be able to do something.

The question is now how to make al l these changes? We have to find solutions, products, services, to answer these questions and change our dai ly habits . But it has to be adapted to nowadays. We have to find real ist ics ideas and solutions to interest people with it and integrate them step by step in the everybody’s l ife.

( 1) - Scramble city - 2010 - Lada Hršak, Michiel van Iersel , Dieuwertje Komen and Neeltje ten Westenend

(2) - Hungry city, How food shapes our l ives - 2009 - Carolyn Steel

(3) - Walden; or , Life in the Woods - 1854 - Henri David Tho-reau

(4) - Interview of Douwe Jan Joustra - Libération.com - newspaper- 23th of february 2013

REFERENCES

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( 1) - FredMeyer Hypermarkets by Lyza Danger, in 2004

(2) - Mutatutoes, by Ul i Westphal , s ince 2006 Since 2006, he has been col lected «non-standards» fruits and vegetable in order to reveal their beauty. On the markets many of these products are throw away because they don’t sel l enough. But they are as tasty as the others .

(3) - Endcommercial , by Scheppe Böhm Associates, with photographs by Florian Böhm, Luca Pizzaroni and Wolfgang Scheppe. They are col lecting since 1997 pictures of cit ies in which they photographed smal l detai ls and gather them according to their subjects. This project is a part of the Slow Design movement.

(4) - Amazingness, by Anna Hi l lman, no ending project. She’s constantly col lecting photos of detai ls from nature within cit ies. This project is a part of the Slow Design movement.

IMAGES

Floriane Missl in - february 2013