Urban Farm DB
Research catalogue
Database research record2023·United Kingdom

24 Algorithmic Food Justice

Lara Houston, Sara Heitlinger, Ruth Catlow, Alex Taylor

Bristol University Press eBooks

Urban Farm DB summary

This piece asks under what technoscientific conditions food scarcity might be understood as contingent on heterogeneous actors, and how the possibility of food abundance might be approached as a reparative project revaluing those manifold relations, framing blockchain as an infrastructure offering both productive imaginaries and challenges to such work. A series of workshops critically experimented with these possibilities and challenges, working with diverse participants — community growers, organizers, artists and technologists — who used playful methods to act out fictional scenarios set in 2025, a speculative future in which all of London had been transformed into a city farm. For the organizations and participants involved, reparation meant working in the aftermath of social and environmental collapse to bring into being more-than-human value systems that radically decentered human knowledge and experience.