Project by Valeria Ramirez
East Harlem is one of the most food-insecure neighborhoods in New York City. While community gardens, composting collectives, and informal food networks have emerged as tools of care and resistance, they remain fragmented and insufficient. This project asks: What would it actually take for East Harlem to feed itself? And what spatial, cultural, and political changes would that require?
Through a speculative Crisis Cabinet, five figures representing different perspectives: a plant-based advocate, an animal defender, a meat eater, a member of the Puerto Rican community, and a composter, are invited to negotiate what food sovereignty might look like. Their debate reveals the conflicting demands between ethics, property, space, and labor. A series of urban sections grounded in real data reveals the scale of transformation needed: for instance, over 36 hectares of land would be required to sustain animal-based diets locally, while a fully plant-based system would still demand that over 70% of the neighborhood’s land be dedicated to food production. These sections challenge the assumption that food self-sufficiency is simply a matter of access, they show how it would radically reshape urban life.
Speculative collages explore how these scenarios might materialize: turning rooftops into farms, domestic kitchens into hydroponic labs, and public gardens into zones of productivity. What for one group appears as ecological utopia, for another threatens cultural erasure or overwork. In response, the project proposes a toolkit that analyzes existing community infrastructures (hydroponic systems, compost hubs, chicken coops, casitas, insect hotels, low-tech gardening tools) and explores how they could be adapted or scaled without undermining the social ecosystems they support. The final layer, a comic-like section, traces these tensions at the scale of the everyday: elders asked to farm more to sustain a volunteer model. cultural spaces in the community gardens displaced by crop rows, neighbors negotiating over where to raise chickens or grow lettuce. These stories reveal that food sovereignty is not a neutral goal, but a cosmopolitical field of negotiation.
The Edible Rebellion is not a finished proposal, it is a prototype for thinking, a spatial test of what it truly means to claim autonomy over food, in a dense, divided, and unequal city. It asks: can architecture support the messy, ongoing work of survival and resistance?
These unresolved tensions remind us that spatial and political shifts happen through an ongoing dialogue. And in that complexity, there is also agency. Perhaps, from within those negotiations, something collective, and more just can begin.
