| 11. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976, et al.
(author)
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CO-MAPPING: The Sustainable Compact and Green City
- 2014
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In: IGU Urban Commission Conference.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The 2011 Report from the Swedish Research Council FORMAS on Urban Sustainable Development, points toward a current knowledge gap in understanding the connections between citizen and the built environment. According to the report, there is an unquestioned link between built environment and living conditions by which man, by acting in and appropriating the built environment, is also its cocreator. One of the major concerns in current urban planning and structuring of urban planning policies, deals with lack of understanding the perception of the built environment, including the citizens perspective, and the communication gap with experts resulting from this. To create a built environment that satisfies the citizen’s role, we have to first understand who the citizen is based on their location, and how they perceive and want to inhabit their urban space. The authors’ focus of research lies in investigating the citizen’s/user’s perception of the the built environment within a variety of urban typologies in order to identify its creative potentials, such as urban green potentials and sustainable compact mixed city.The paper examines this new design process of ‘co-mapping’, which the authors have identified as a co-creative methodology to sustainable urban development. The methodology focuses on the feasibility of using a collaborative mapping application on a hand-held communications device as a comprehensive survey tool for categorically ‘mapping’ user-perceptions on urban conditions. The evaluation and testing of the methods takes place through a series of workshops around themes of ‘Urban Green Potential’ and ‘Compact Mixed City’. The Co-Mapping© application, designed by the authors with trans-disciplinary efforts with GIS specialists and software designers, utilizes the accessibility of smartphones and diverse geo-technology to create a versatile survey mapping system. The web-based real-time visualization strategies of the output data are employed for efficient dissemination of information as a two-way communications tool.
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| 12. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Corporeal Encounters with Farmscapes
- 2017
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In: 8th AESOP Sustainable Food Planning Conference 2017. ; , s. 16-
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The past decade has produced a thriving archive of urban farming examples and enthusiastic urban inhabitants implementing food gardening in the Global North. Despite all collected knowledge and skills, there still exists a distance between awareness and more extensive committed action. This slow uptake calls for furthering the boundary of alternate methods in urban-making in which artistic research can expand spatial imaginations that trigger experiential ecological awareness and becoming. This paper explores methods which aim to traverse this gap by employing the body as a main tool of inquiry. How can we enable and set up modes of curiosity-driven encounters that activate ecological awareness and imaginaries which transform into a methodology for exploring new delicious urban fictions to live by?In using artistic research approaches, there is potential to encounter urban food issues by setting up different spatial relations with nature in the city that activate deeper commitments to the environment and go beyond local food movements and surface tactility. An underlying experiential 'thickness' exists in the corporeal-to-space relation that needs exploration as it can motivate an ecological place attachment to these farmscapes that flies under practice and theory radars. This paper presents the case study 'Organoleptic Interfaces' to exemplify three modes of inquiry through its interfaces. The first mode, ‘Paperscapes’, includes a making-knowledge workshop delving into Masanobu Fukuoka's natural farming theory. A second methodology utilizes performance to disseminate such knowledge to a wider unassuming audience. The third approach deepens the visceral practice with a Butoh choreography workshop exploring embodied and sensorial understandings of ecological practice. The case is accompanied by a short film essay that is appended to this paper. Results include an assortment of reformulated embodied methodologies for curating a corporeal politics and poetics in ecological urban-making around farmscapes, and an extended curiosity that has potential to reach wider urban audiences. Artistic research has the ability to stage surprises and an awareness that might not be found with normative practice and theory. We eat daily and the body is a fundamental untapped resource in the way that we live in and treat urban contexts.
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| 13. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Extracting Urban Food Potential: design-based methods for digital and bodily cartography
- 2015
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In: Future of Food: Journal on Food, Agriculture and Society. - 2197-411X. ; 3:1, s. 48-62
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Sweden’s recent report on Urban Sustainable Development calls out a missing link between the urban design process and citizens. This paper investigates if engaging citizens as design agents by providing a platform for alternate participation can bridge this gap, through the transfer of spatial agency and new modes of critical cartography. To assess whether this is the case, the approaches are applied to Stockholm’s urban agriculture movement in a staged intervention. The aim of the intervention was to engage citizens in locating existing and potential places for growing food and in gathering information from these sites to inform design in urban agriculture. The design-based methodologies incorporated digital and bodily interfaces for this cartography to take place. The Urban CoMapper, a smartphone digital app, captured real-time perspectives through crowd-sourced mapping. In the bodily cartography, participant’s used their bodies to trace the site and reveal their sensorial perceptions. The data gathered from these approaches gave way to a mode of artistic research for exploring urban agriculture, along with inviting artists to be engaged in the dialogues. In sum, results showed that a combination of digital and bodily approaches was necessary for a critical cartography if we want to engage citizens holistically into the urban design process as spatial agents informing urban policy. Such methodologies formed a reflective interrogation and encouraged a new intimacy with nature, in this instance, one that can transform our urban conduct by questioning our eating habits: where we get our food from and how we eat it seasonally.
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| 14. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Extracting Urban Green Potential: Critical Design-Based Use of Digital and Bodily Cartography Methods
- 2017
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In: Agriculture in an Urbanizing Society Volume Two: Proceedings of the Sixth AESOP Conference on Sustainable Food Planning. - 9781443899840 ; , s. 1097-1122
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Book chapter (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In two volumes, selected papers presented at the sixth AESOP conference on Sustainable Food Planning are brought together, representing the academic work of worldwide experts in the fields of food planning and urban agriculture. This volume, therefore, provides an overview of the latest, state-of-the-art research in the field, drawing from areas such as spatial planning, urban design, governance, social innovation, entrepreneurship, and local initiatives, among others, to represent the current knowledge base for creating sustainable urban food projects.Seven papers are part of the extraordinary ideas and initiatives thematic area. In this section, proposals and projects in unexpectedly related fields such as art, performance, installation, or other impossibilities are presented or researched with viewpoints outside current discourses, and everything else. Orrù (Chapter Forty-Four) presents explorative modes of inquiry incorporating digital and bodily cartography, tools, and platforms that provide an alternative approach to greening the city, engaging citizens as agents, and transforming urban food-related lifestyles.
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| 15. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
-
Extracting Urban Green Potential: critical design-based use of digital and bodily co-mapping methods
- 2014
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In: 6th AESOP Sustainable Food PLanning Conference - Finding space for productive cities, Leeuwarden, NL. ; , s. 19-
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The 2011 Swedish FORMAS Report on Urban Sustainable Development identifies a knowledge gap in the relationship between citizen and city. The report maintains that there is an unquestionable link between built environment and living conditions through which urban inhabitants, by acting within and appropriating their surroundings, also become co-creators of the city's fabric. This lack of encompassing citizens’ interpretation, and the communication gap between citizens and experts, calls for alternatives to mainstream urban design processes especially when it comes to urban foodscapes. To encourage more resilient approaches, we must actively engage city dwellers and seek to comprehend their immediate contexts, perceptions, and how they engage with urban green spaces – in sum, a transfer and democratisation of spatial agency.This paper sets out the preliminary stages of using some explorative tools in critical cartography to initiate this transfer, thereby creating opportunities for transforming urban food-related lifestyles. Comparative modes of inquiry incorporating the digital and bodily, tool and platform, are explored through active and design-based research as an alternate approach to greening the city and engaging the citizen as agent. These methodologies invite interrogation of what we eat and where our food comes from, while also encouraging a certain intimacy to emerge with the urban landscape and a revaluation of its seasonal rhythms.Urban CoMapper is a digital tool that explores connections between citizen, built environment and experts though a smartphone interface for community mapping. Its research thematic for locating urban green potential in foodscapes is to investigate the role of food in both the urban landscape and policy-making. Via their devices, participants can effectively contribute to the urban green planning process. Through this approach we can investigate citizens’ links to their immediate environment, exploring their perception of urban conditions to identify creative strategies for engagement and change. In the first phase, the tool charts existing and potential Stockholm sites for urban farming via a real-time comprehensive survey. In the second phase, the body is engaged as interface to explore creative cartographical methods from an organoleptic perspective. This phase presupposes the capacity of such green spaces to stimulate the senses, leading to a heightened awareness of ‘food behaviours’ that cannot be captured by a digital device. The assumption holds that through an social-ecological lens, these heightened sensorial encounters render inhabitants more emotionally inclined to adjust food-related habits. The transdisciplinary Gröna Linjen platform plays a significant role in evaluating such cartographical research and digital tools through a series of events that facilitate bodily contact with the sites. The platform provides a vibrant alliance of artists, architects, landscapers, gardeners, performers, geographers and others to depict urban food in creative and engaging ways. Here, interventions called ‘safaris’ are staged to foster interest in urban farming, encourage tactile engagement with the neighbourhood fabric, knit together existing farming initiatives, as well as showcase potential sites for further exploration. Participants embark on overland expeditions to discover existing green treasures and potential ‘acupuncture points’ that could revive community involvement, integration, underutilized spaces, and increase biodiversity. The safaris serve as bodily, cartographical exercises whereby the process of actively engaging with soil, body and stomach takes on an organoleptic dimension. Through eating, growing, and traversing a landscape, sites are ‘interpreted’ and reciprocally stimulated. The challenge remains whether the interplay between these methods of digital and bodily cartography leads to an emergent space for food as an inclusive medium in sustainable urban design, planning and living.
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| 16. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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‘Foodprints’ - a project investigating the role of Artistic and Design-based research within urban agriculture
- 2012
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In: conference proceedings.
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The presentation will demonstrate how the project ‘Foodprints’ was created from a platform of artistic and design-based research with empirical methods for data from unique urban-agro sites, multi-disciplinary input, quantitative analysis, literature, and the art of cooking in sensory design. The presentation demonstrates the project’s aspirations to instigate change on 3 levels: urban planning, design approaches and city inhabitant levels. It will also serve as an introduction and discourse into research questions currently explored in my doctoral.‘Foodprints’ is a biologically-centered design and discussion toolkit for developing an urban food strategy amongst city designers, inhabitants and planners. The project applied concepts taken from biomimicry, systems thinking and scenario building to support development for new urban food models that could function mimicking the remarkable efficiencies found in nature. The toolkit produced a methodology to map the behavior of citizens, politics, architecture, logistics, food, farming and ecology within the urbanscape. It envisioned the city as a multi-organism, not as a fragmented site, and devised a catalyst to help navigate through the diversely complex issues surrounding urban agriculture and individual’s food relationships, creating a discussion platform for food, its stakeholders, urban metabolism, and opportunities towards a resilient future. Although ‘Foodprints’ was primarily aimed as a tool for developers, planners, architects and others in the built environment professions, it could also be used as an educational tool that could further be adopted in schooling, workshops, and everyday discourse about urban food logistics. Particular consideration was paid to urban planning policy for instigating ‘food strategies’ into policy-making as much as energy, water and waste have become. The project worked in collaboration with the Stockholm Resilience Centre in Sweden, KTH and FoAM to narrow down our catalyst framework typologies to 8 themes. The presentation will discuss each typology, docked also in its relevance to research on planetary boundaries and ecosystem services by the resilience centre.The methodology had strong foundations in artistic and design-based research. We explored whether and how to make these research typologies a serious consideration in built environment fields. We examined imaginative approaches to challenge urban planning mindsets by using diverse strategies both as inspiration and dissemination.
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| 17. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Green Line
- 2015
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Green Line (Gröna Linjen), is a group of artists, architects, performers, geographers and more, but also an edible route through Stockholm. In two overland expeditions, Gröna Linjen safaris 1 & 2, we weave together urban farming initiatives in Stockholm along the #17 metro line in an effort to give them ‘a place on the map.’
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| 18. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Instant Cartography
- 2015
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Other publication (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Similar to eating ‘showing the way’ is a basic human condition. Instant Cartography is a somatic cartography recording memories and directions. The negotiation is between a professional cartographer and the transient guide found on the streets of Malmö. These memory maps are an instantaneous understanding aimed to making lost strangers find their way again.
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| 19. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Organoleptic Interfaces: Exploring Embodied Methods in Foodscapes
- 2016
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- In the move to re-acquaint urban green and in-between spaces as solely parks and open spaces, this research looks to the concept of emerging foodscapes to form a transformative behaviour with food in the city. Urban population growth, unstable food security, environmental consequences of industrial food production are all motives for concern, alongside individual awareness of food provisioning, seasonal availability and behaviour. As these challenges increase in complexity, alternate methods and processes are needed to formulate a symphony of relations to instigate action and agency from urban inhabitants that need to be put into dynamic constructs to revise behaviours and reframe patterns of thought. The research methodology embarks on artistic-based explorations into the role of corporeal thinking, situated knowledge, and sensorial relevance for studying the relation between body, food, and time within urban-making. In order to explore what spatial immersions could trigger behavioural shifts, the research approach has two sequential phases with three conceptual ingredients: embodiment, the senses and time in preparation for relating to the body as a mode of enquiring. Phase 1 deals with 2 types of critical cartography: bodily and digital staging diverse modes of movement and immersion from feet to mouth through two overland green safaris, an app interface survey, and a tracing of the memory through place. Phase 2 deals with a bodily choreography and ‘instruction’ to find deeper forms of visceral enquiry via Butoh dance and other conditions for making and staging fiction. Each phase is done under two constructed platforms for the investigations, Gröna Linjen in Stockholm and AHA Festival in Gothenburg, that endeavour to ‘amplify’ the everyday experience around food. All experiments generate different modes of relating to the environment to produce situated knowledge using key methodological models including imagineering and staging fiction, metaphor and performativity. Thereby they also open for further theoretical approaches. The findings from these dynamic corporeal assemblages is that in the process of embodiment, the invisible is made visible. In essence the body becomes a ‘connector’; between behaviour and space, everyday rhythms and ecology, and between humans and plants creating zones for meaning and deeper commitment.
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| 20. |
- Orru, Anna Maria, 1976
(author)
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Time for an Urban (Re)evolution – Negotiating Body, Space and Food
- 2015
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In: PARSE Conference: The 1st PARSE Biennial Research Conference on TIME , Nov 4-6 2015, Göteborg SE. ; , s. 20-
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Food is rhythmical and reoccurring, permeating a major part of our everyday city lives; yet it is rarely considered in urban design. There is a missing link in the food-to-time rapport with urban space and how the body relates to it, in which the concept of a cyclical process has been concealed from the urban experience. In order to confront this, this paper explores and evaluates the artistic method of butoh dance in order to bring the body into the urban food discourse performatively. Butoh sheds light on how the inclusion of embodiment within imagineering can emphasize the timely aspect of urban space and food production as a cyclical process. Imagineering is a design technique that uses narrative to generate an imagined emergence of a concept. By placing the body at the centre of my methodology, I explore the negotiation it has with time, space and food. From within architectural research I pose the question: How can the interaction of the body in butoh practice and food production, set in relation to one another, improve the understanding and handling of urban space where time is an aspect in design? My methodology is framed in micro and macro perspective lenses, where the butoh body is brought into the process of shaping urban environment through techniques such as: rebellion, interaction, mimesis, agro-roots, transformation, metamorphosis and reflection. The micro lens is explored through the bodily choreography and detail of body technique in a butoh dance performance at the AHA festival in Gothenburg, Sweden. The macro lens is implemented in an experimental-making of an ecological living system and foodscape called ‘Paperscapes,’ which becomes the stage for that performance. These embodiments of making and performing are part of a process of imagineering, drawn from the butoh metaphor and biomimicry, to enable an imagined emergence of another way of approaching urban foodscapes. In exploring the butoh body in its spatial-to-corporeal relationship, the Japanese spatio-temporal concept of ma – an interval, gap, opening, awareness – helps understand how temporal progression relies on space awareness, how spatial progression relies on time, and the potential transformation which exists in this ‘interval’. The use of butoh exposes the landscape in an ‘circular-timed’ orientation, and this sheds light on the transformation of everyday collective ‘rhythms’ and behaviour with food.
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