Communal Mapping Workshops- Gentrified Food Futures

Overview

The Comunal Mapping Workshops extended the Gentrified Food Futures project into a participatory practice, adapting the Ethnographic Experiential Futures (EXF) methodology to explore the urban foodscape. Instead of producing speculative objects alone, participants co-created communal maps that traced how food, aesthetics, and identity are reshaped by gentrification. Through this process, mapping became both research tool and collective storytelling device.

Context

Ethnographic Experiential Futures is typically used to surface narratives of possibility through immersive scenarios. In this project, it was reimagined for communal food landscape mapping, where participants charted memories, emotions, and sensory associations alongside physical places. By situating futures thinking in the everyday practice of eating and sharing food, the workshops allowed neighbors, restaurant workers, and visitors to visualize how gentrification alters not only access to food, but also the cultural presence of flavors, smells, and aesthetics.

Two workshops were held with different groups—each bringing its own perspectives. One emphasized proximity and belonging, focusing on community anchors and intimate traditions; the other highlighted the broader gastronomic ecosystem, including street stalls, emblematic venues, and shifting aesthetics. Together, they revealed contrasting ways of valuing, preserving, and imagining the neighborhood’s food futures.

Outcome

The resulting maps are both archives and interventions—layered cartographies that combine ethnographic detail with speculative imagination. Exhibited as part of Gentrified Food Futures, they document collective visions of gastronomy in transition and invite the wider public to reflect on how gentrification reconfigures not only the city’s physical landscape, but also its sensory and cultural fabric.