Eat a Memory : A Tool for Urban Archival Practices to Support Citizens’ Participation in Urban Development

Abstract

The work presented in this paper explores the potential of urban gardening communities to be ‘read’ as urban archives and become platforms for collecting, storing, transmitting new and diverse stories about neighbourhoods, and/or communities. The first step of this exploratory study is to create a series of interventions in form of design activities and artistic actions/gestures dedicated to prototype and test how an urban garden can be collected and stored in an urban archive. The series of interventions results in a methodological toolbox containing a set of tools and methods. In this paper the tool Eat a Memory is presented and discussed. The basic idea of this intervention is to explore food and meals as performed memories, and cooking as archival practice. Through the act of cooking and eating, memories are performed, shared and stored in various formats. A joint meal in form of a potluck is applied as a platform to access and record histories of people and places. We suggest that Eat a Memory can be applied as a tool for capturing intangible data of neighbourhoods, and communities, and create a new kind of urban archive which may support and encourage citizen participation, and become a resource in urban development.