Global-Local Cage Match

It seems like everywhere you turn, there is some new book, article or movie popping up to tell you about the local-global debate these days. There is so much information out there that it can be hard to keep track of what you have and have not read, or even remember what your opinion on the subject is, when everyone else is throwing their opinions at you.

Last night I came across this article in the Globe and Mail that attempts to highlight the points for each argument - local and global - and actually does a pretty good job of it. The thing is, after studying this topic for over a year I feel as if I COULD argue either way. There are valid points on both sides of the court. There are clear positives and negatives to each side of the argument, and it's taken me a year to come to that conclusion.

The real argument, I think, is for a system that is both local and global in scale. It's about recognizing the realities of a world with 8 billion inhabitants that need to get fed, yet also understanding that I, specifically, live quite well in a first world country, and have the luxury of treating what I eat as more than mere substanance. I have the luxury of being educated and making choices. Because the best part about food, any food, is that it is not only essential to our survival, but also about culture, community, history and tradition, and the only real way to weigh the argument is by figuring out how much those things mean to you.

My thesis in five words:

Food
Distribution
Toronto
Local
Engagement/Interaction

So maybe there are six words... but it's pretty darn close. Those last two are basically one word, especially in the architecture vocabulary. Engagment and interaction. Rarely can you have one without the other.

It was an interesting exercise, distilling the idea into five words, and it surprisingly came much more quickly and easily than I thought it would. I suppose that's one thing that I have always been good at, is making an idea as concise as possible. I feel like it's a sign of what is to come over the next couple of months. That the argument is going to tighten itself up and become really clear... that the ideas are going to materialize as diagrams, drawings and words on paper, and one day I will actually be finished this thing.

It's got me thinking...

I just stumbled across an article on the Musagetes (the UW architecture library) blog and it's got me thinking about the amount of waste that is produced by the food industry each year. Now I KNOW that this thesis is about food distribution and the inefficiencies involved in getting our food from the field to the table, but I wonder... is there some way that I can include a 'waste not, want not' system into the design component of my thesis?

And on that note; I am itching to get down and dirty with the design of my thesis. It seems like every time I start, something else pops up... and now I have lots of case studies, written pages, more diagrams than appendages and even a demographic analysis of the site... but no design.

June is looking closer than ever.