Global Brooklyn: Designing Food Experiences in World Cities

Description

What do the fashionable food hot spots of Cape Town, Mumbai, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro, and Tel Aviv have in common? Despite all their differences, consumers in each major city are drawn to a similar atmosphere: rough wooden tables in postindustrial interiors lit by edison bulbs. There, they enjoy single-origin coffee, kombucha, and artisanal bread. This is 'Global Brooklyn,' a new transnational aesthetic regime of urban consumption. It may look shabby and improvised, but it is all carefully designed. It may romance the analog, but is made to be Instagrammed. It often references the New York borough, but is shaped by many networked locations where consumers participate in the global circulation of styles, flavors, practices, and values. This book follows this phenomenon across different world cities, arguing for a stronger appreciation of design and materialities in understanding food cultures. Attentive to local contexts, struggles, and identities, contributors explore the global mobility of aesthetic, ethical, and entrepreneurial projects, and how they materialize in everyday practices on the ground. They describe new connections among eating, drinking, design, and communication in order to give a clearer sense of the contemporary transformations of food cultures around the world.

Fabio Parasecoli is Professor of Food Studies in the Department of Nutrition and Food Studies, New York University, USA. Mateusz Halawa is based at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Poland.

Global Brooklyn's authors motivate audiences to ask themselves how design strategies could more accurately reflect the spaces and communities they affect. Most importantly, their arguments prove that Taste is purposefully influenced to keep certain entities alive - a phenomenon all too real in our post-2020 climate. * Bailey McAlister, Georgia State University, USA * Revelatory, witty, and absorbing. 'Global Brooklyn' is not just bare wood, chalkboards, and exposed brick from Capetown to Copenhagen, it's a way of describing comparative social change in culinary terms. The coffee shops and restaurants have the same look, but the essays show how different the hip contexts are. * Paul Freedman, Professor of History, Yale University, USA * The authors analyze the 'hipsterization' of popular neighborhoods and how it impacts cultural production processes, citizen behavior, urban transformation, entrepreneurial activities, and innovation. This gives us a powerful tool for understanding what they call 'Global Brooklyness.' * Steffano Maffei, Professor of Design, The Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy *