I was invited to give a talk at the Sint-Lucas Faculty of Architecture, KULeuven in Ghent, Belgium, on 28 October 2013. The title was “Meat and Sustainability: Trojan Horse and Dark Matter”, in which I have shared my look on strategic design and sustainability through the lens of beef production and consumption worldwide and in Finnish context. The content of the talk included problem framing in design, soft paternalism and systems thinking.

The talk was opened by Koen Meersman who leads IA Matters, the Interior Architecture Community at Sint Lucas School of Architecture, and Kris Scheerlink, the program director of the master programmes at Sint Lucas School of Architecture, as it was a joint conference of those two programmes. Sint-Lucas is the oldest and the best architecture school in Belgium, and I was honoured to be there to share my experience.

I have been invited to the poster session of Futures for Food conference in Turku with Beef Finland 2012 project. Few talks in the conference were interesting whilst most of the information was neither with fresh perspective nor new.

One particularly interesting talk I had was with Birgit Busicchia, a PhD candidate at Macquarie University in Sidney researching the dimensions of food security policy in developed economies. Her research was a comparative analysis between Australia, the UK, and France of the dimensions of their respective food systems and policy environments. It was carried out in the tradition of political economy with historical institutionalism as an analytical framework to establish if there is a notion of food policy regime emerging from the research.

Some quotations from her conference abstract:

Is it reasonable to assume that different political economy contexts may have different futures of food? This comparative analysis proposes to explore how political economic variables impact upon and shape current and future food economies of selected developed countries. In view of the interplay between political systems and food systems, it subsequently attempts to imagine their respective futures. Australia, the United Kingdom and France present significant variations as well as similarities to allow for assessing how national political structures, modes of interest mediation and varieties of capitalism construct their respective present and future food economies. Central to this analysis is the question of whether market based instruments and mechanisms, so pivotal to liberal market economies, can be politically enduring as well as being able to deliver adequate social, environmental and economically viable outcomes to the many challenges facing the national food economies. […] This analysis aids our understanding of the situation at present by identifying the principles underpinning the respective national food security discourses and gleans insights into the contested future of food in these wealthy nations.

Institutions can be the cause and remedies to economic, social, and environmental shocks and their associated problems. For instance, the protection of the farmer’s rights have enabled small to medium size farming entities to remain active within the French agricultural sector. In contrast, Britain’s market based mechanisms regulating land ownership have pushed agricultural land prices to unaffordable levels, thus prohibiting entries of new players in the agricultural sector. Today in France, about half of the population live in rural or near rural area working directly and indirectly in agriculture whereas in Australia most of farming is done by the gigantic corporations and only 2% of the population reside in rural area.

You can see Busicchia’s recent writings on The Conversation here.

Today I have been appointed as one of the Demos Helsinki Associates. I will be contributing to internal development of Demos Helsinki with an emphasis on design competence as well as working on research projects with mutual interests in the future.

Demos Helsinki is an independent think tank based out of Helsinki, and its partners – companies, cities, governments and communities – include Aalto University, Biolan, the Finnish Innovation Fund Sitra, IDEO, Ministry of the Environment, Stanford University, and University of Helsinki, just to mention a few. In the past eight years, Demos Helsinki successfully been leading innovative research and initiatives such as Sustainable Lifestyle 2050 by European Commission and Peloton for low-carbon society.

Read on
Demos Helsinki Global (English)
Demos Helsinki Associates announcement (Finnish)
Demos Helsinki Associates (Finnish)
Partners of Demos Helsinki (Finnish)