Rosie Park

Image displays green beans and a cooking table

Rosie Park is an architectural designer interested in various forms of inclusive spatial practise. Her work centre’s around architecture’s capacity to serve communities.

Rosie graduated from Manchester School of Architecture in 2020, where she received the ‘Steacy Greenaway Prize’ for most outstanding studio work.

During the first year of her masters, Rosie proposed the design for Lewisham Youth Theatre. For this project she was awarded the Technical Studies prize at RCA.

Rosie has a strong interest in public engagement. She co-founded a not-for-profit arts collective in 2018, which hosted nine different large-scale events within the city, with the desire to create equitable and inclusive spaces for amateur artists to perform, make or sell work.

Can we Can

What would a restructured food policy look like if it was centred around conviviality?

The project is interested in the large-scale potential of pressure canning, as a means to combat the commodification of food and eating practises in Britain.

There is a real urgency to re-engineer our food system. As it stands, supermarkets, the main source of the nation’s food supply, have complete monopoly over the prices, conditions and types of food we eat. This is coupled with a government that has abdicated responsibility in providing affordable food or a national food strategy. This has resulted in leaving a huge proportion of people to experience food insecurity.

In addition, supermarkets are governed by ‘just in time, just enough’ economics, meaning there is only ever a few days’ worth of food supply on the shelves. We have become dependent on an incredibly fragile and energy intensive system.

This project therefore explores how pressure canning, a typically domesticated food preservation technique, could be a means of re-engineering our food system.

The project has culminated with the design of a deployable system, where the four stages of canning are broken down into a series of four stations that are connected by a manually operated conveyor belt. This retractable system allows for ease of transportation across each different site where surplus food would otherwise be wasted.

Each station is dedicated to one part of the process, which are: washing, chopping, cooking and canning. Each station was designed to convivially exaggerate each gesture, to encourage members of the public to partake in each stage. These drawings represent how this system can translate across three different sites within South London.

Stuart Road Allotment – This drawing displays how the conveyor belt system could work within Stuart Road allotment, in Nunhead. The system works in conjunction with canning and preserving surplus food from the allotment, mitigating waste and redistributing the preserved food.

Lewisham Open Market – The system can also be deployed to intervene within a market setting, to mitigate waste from unsold produce from the market. It is designed to appear and sit congruously within its surrounding context. This drawing shows the chopping station in use. The public is invited to participate in chopping the produce and throwing the unwanted parts into the basketball hoop.

Sainsburys Car Park, Camberwell – This drawing displays how this system could attach itself within Sainsburys carpark. This iteration is based off conversations with Sainsburys staff members, who explained that the unpackaged vegetables no longer have a sell by date, so members from quality control to come and check whether they are deemed sellable. The final canning stage is shown here, with the theatrical moment of canning aided by a curtain and a pulley system, that lifts the lid of the canner once it has pressurised the jars.

Translation Across Three Sites – These three sites are examples of how this system can be attached to preserve and re-distribute surplus food within existing structures and systems.

Workshop Equipment

Step One: Explanation for the Workshop

Step Two: Cutting and Washing

Step Three: Chopping and Preparing

Step Four: Cooking and Canning

Transforming Public Infrastructure around Eating Practises – Can we transform existing and under-utilised infrastructure around food practises? This drawing explores at a series of scales different methods of appropriating disused public infrastructure.

Spatial Analysis of Existing Food Distribution Charities – This drawing is a typology analysis comparing the modes of operation across these different affordable food models. For example, food sharing app, Olio, is seeking to work within the current system whereas a co-operative model like Fareshares is set up in resistance to our current food regime.

Sainsburys Context Drawing

Adapting a Car Park for Food Preservation

Transforming A Public Fountain around Food Preparation – This drawing seeks to address the hyper-individualised ways in which food is consumed and prepared in the UK. This is proven in the proliferation of the meal deal, a quick and cheap lunch alternative that encourages individual consumption patterns over collective experience. In this drawing, I was trying to consider how you could encourage collective behaviour around food preparation, not just consumption. Here I’ve shown how you could adapt a public fountain as a space for washing and preparing food.

Testing a Conveyor Belt within Sainsburys Car Park – This drawing demonstrates how useful the physical workshop was in informing the spatial configuration for the proposal. Prior to the workshop, the space was organised in a cyclical form, using a 'lazy susan' mechanism with all the processes happening around the canner and being specialised to do so. However after the workshop, I started iterating designs that took the form of a production line, using a conveyor belt mechanism.

Designing the Production Line

Testing Ideas for the Deployable Stations

Medium:

Hand drawings

Tin Can Apron

Tin Can Apron - Stop Motion

I made the tin can apron as an entry point to discussing misinformation and misconceptions surrounding food, such as the misconception that fresh vegetables are more nutritious than tinned. Canned vegetables provide an affordable and accessible source of nutrition, and Jack Monroe, who was named the tin can cook, explains that as a single mother canned food enabled her to feed her and her son on a £10 weekly budget. The tin can apron is intentionally a restrictive object to wear, to demonstrate the limitation of cooking with only canned food.

Food Desert Mapped: Sainsburys to Southampton Way Estate

Drone Footage: Mapping a Food Desert

Alongside the issue of affordability, there are significant barriers people face when it comes to accessing heathy nutritious foods. Areas that are not served by a large food retailer are called food deserts and are typically an issue for people from lower-income backgrounds, who have low levels of car ownership and poorer public transport services. One example of an existing food desert in London is Southampton Way estate, which is a half an hour walk from the nearest large supermarket retailer. To demonstrate the real lack of provision of healthy affordable food, I walked the distance from the supermarket to Southampton way estate and this is the drone footage.

Rosie Park

Medium:

Social

About

Royal College of Art