“EDIBLE” EASTERN MARKET: scenario per un quartiere più produttivo e resiliente = “EDIBLE” EASTERN MARKET: scenario for a more productive and resilient neighborhood

Food is the foundation of human development as well as the development of ever larger cities ready to welcome a larger number of inhabitants. According to current statistics, in the year 2050 the world population will increase, especially in developing countries, to reach 9.8 billion individuals compared to the current 7 billion (United Nations, 2009). But what will happen when there is not enough soil and as many resources to produce enough food to feed so many mouths? The path we intend to tackle within this thesis is to analyze how some problems deriving from a post-industrial and demographic economic crisis of one of the most flourishing and inhabited American cities of the 1950s can be solved through various practices including that of urban agriculture. Among the recurring problems of post-industrial scenarios we find the innumerable physical and social voids left within the urban plot that we could define as true and proper tears of the latter. The problem of food deserts is linked to the problem of food deserts “that is to say areas characterized by poor or no quality food supply opportunities and their effects on the spread of diseases such as diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases” (Coppola A. 2011) . Food is now more than ever an urban issue, we must not forget that “without farmers and agriculture, cities would not exist” (Steel C. 2013). Today any type of food is consumed, most of us live in ignorance of the effort needed to feed ourselves (Steel C. 2013), we do not mind where that food comes from, we have lost contact with the raw material and it has been lost in every field from industrial to food, any product is imported and exported regardless of the impact that this continuous coming and going has on the environment. The identification of some basic problems in Detroit has led to the hypothesis phase to mediate and somehow solve these problems. We will illustrate the concept of urban agriculture intended as a catalyst for the transformation of both the unsustainable and healthy food system and for the urban transformation and regeneration of the Motor city, which becomes a real urban laboratory on which to experiment with this new phenomenon. Going into detail, we will then illustrate what the existing cultivation methods are and how they interact with architecture in terms of space and technologies: vertical farms and rooftop greenhouses. It should not be forgotten that the topic under investigation is completely new as only thanks to technological advances and substantial funding, some previously experimental projects have been carried out, managing to materialize these new so-called “hybrid architectures” (Negrello M. 2019), thus passing from utopias drawn on paper with concrete space designs. Finally, we will come to a project whose goal will be to improve the existing Detroit food system towards a healthier and safer system, no longer linear but circular where new connections can be created that are now disconnected, rewriting the relationship between actors and activities (Andersson D. and Andersson A. 2008). Create a platform where food flow and all urban infrastructure work together to create a more resilient urban food supply system. So in improving the food production system we will try to improve housing, transport, social and above all the environment.