Food as a layer for strengthening the socio-cultural identity of the city: a case of Bhopal

Abstract

Food has been central to human settlements also giving a rich vibrancy and putting food-centered conviviality at the heart. Food has also been responsible for shaping our urban spaces and our perception of places within the cities. Yet food remains a less explored topic while understanding the city, other than few mentions like Sir William Whyte, Carolyn Steele, and Susan Parham among others, the theory doesn’t talk much about food per se. My area of inquiry is “Can we look at the cities through Food lenses”. Food has a profound impact on placemaking, which is also seen from the experiments done by Sir William Whyte where he says, ‘food attracts people who attract more people’. Another aspect of placemaking that is often not brought up in the mainstream design issue is “smellscape”. The scent has unique qualities that impact placemaking, it also plays an important role in how we experience the cities and the way we think about them but is often not considered in the design and management of the city. The smell scapes of our towns and cities have changed significantly in the past century, especially with air pollutants having a significant impact upon our experience of the city. Placemaking is an important aspect of city branding, which can contribute to the positive image of the city. Image planning strategies have become essential for the city’s economy. Urban branding is something that not only promotes the positive image of the city but most importantly an urban experience. It stresses what a visitor should see about the city. Heritage walks in this context becomes an important activity that helps display the local culture and heritage of a place. Heritage walks till now have been limited to historical monuments, the recent increase in consumption culture has led to the exploration of different theme based heritage walks too. The thesis aims to reinforce the identity of Architectural and culinary heritage of the city. The site has a great potential of existing food outlets that share a strong smell scape, it also has several heritage structures at a walkable distance from each other. The pressing issues are, that a historical precinct that has a strong cultural value is less active, the old cities were mainly designed for pedestrians and since the vehicles came into the picture it has affected the pedestrian safety and altered the food smell scape of the place. Also, the existing heritage walks do not cover the culinary aspects of heritage.The proposals include a new route for heritage walk that also covers the eateries that share a stronger smell scape and has underlying heritage value, creating pedestrian malls and reducing the vehicle speed through tactical interventions to improve pedestrian safety and enhance food smell scape and lastly improving the accessibility of the historical precinct through the extension of the existing food and cloth market so that the derelict monuments within the precinct comes into the public eye which then contributes to the image of the city and ultimately to city branding.