Food Places through the Visual Media: Building Gastronomic Cartographies between Italy and Australia

Abstract

Considering the urban environment of the city as a cultural generator connected to food production and consumption habits, this chapter investigates the everyday life practices relating to food as connected to the archetypical architectural food spaces of the domestic kitchen, the caf鬠the market, and the street, through a comparison between Australian and Italian contexts. Assuming food and food culture to have theatrical and symbolic aspects connected to space, the paper argues the significance of such media as graphic advertising, cookbooks, television shows and movies as vehicles for the understanding of the social, economic and cultural transmission in relation to food space. The links between society, culture, rural and urban landscape, slowness and fastness of society, will be analysed through those media, advancing then the necessity to build a scheme capable of mapping the relationships between those factors, in order to visualise the present condition and predict future potential scenarios within a perspective of food equity and environmental sustainability. Drawing on recent methodological advances, the chapter will explore the insights offered through the representations of food production and consumption in the Australian and Italian contexts from the domestic to the urban scale. This discussion will suggest that gastronomy can be seen as a tool for transforming the built environment. Considering then the theoretical studies of mapping in the work of architects and graphic designers, on these premises the chapter will present hypothetical models for the mapping of food culture and its relationship to the transformation of the built environment.