Professor Sarosh Anklesaria recently published a longform essay in Strelka Magazine, titled “Cooking New Worlds: From Machinic Architectures to Biome Ecologies.” His work disentangles the machinic architectures of planetary food production, and points to other ways of worldbuilding, by introducing the Urban Symbiome—a proposed vision for a future based on an ethic of kinship, degrowth, and circular thinking. The project serves as a template for “cooking new worlds” across various geographies, and promotes acts of symbiosis toward steady-state economies. Instead of extractive constructions, the Urban Symbiome reuses building materials through acts of urban mining. The modernism of steel and concrete is further replaced by mycelium, hemp, timber, and compressed earth, which allow for architectures of growth and decay.
This work also relates to expansive research being done in the context of the ASO Studio Anklesaria is teaching this semester, “Radical Food: from the global to the gut,” which focuses on a food district for Braddock, PA.
Read the essay in Strelka Magazine for more on the entanglements of planetary food, urbanism, and worldbuilding.
All images for The Urban Symbiome were prepared by Anklesaria in collaboration with Priyanka Sheth. Supporting images for Strelka Magazine, unless specified otherwise, were prepared by Anklesaria in collaboration with SoA students Shariq Shah, Leah Kendrick, and Lana Kozlovskaya.