Carolyn Steel

Carolyn Steel

Carolyn Steel, London, UK. An architect, teacher and writer, Steel researches the inner life of cities and seeks to develop an approach to urban design that takes into account the routines that shape cities and the way we inhabit them. Steel has led design studios at the London School of Economics, London Metropolitan University and the University of Cambridge. The Ecologist Magazine featured her as “one of the UK’s ten greatest visionaries of the 21st century.” Steel had always been interested in buildings, but not just their physical form. She wanted to know how they were inhabited, where the food came in, where the horses were, what happened to the rubbish… She was fascinated by the public and private divisions within buildings, and the way these subtly intertwined. After studying architecture at Cambridge, she began looking for ways to bring architecture to life and vice versa, which took her to Rome in the 1990s, where she studied the everyday habits of a local neighbourhood, where she studied architecture and how she lived. and the London School of Economics, where she was director of studies for the Cities, Architecture and Engineering programme. There she met architects, politicians, economists, developers, sociologists, housing experts and engineers, who were struggling to find a common thread with which to talk about cities. Steel then had the idea of ​​using food for this purpose. Her book Hungry Cities is the result.