Low Carbon Chinatown 低碳唐人街
Low Carbon Chinatown is a project by one of our Associate Artistic Directors Ling Tan who is a designer and artist. The project combines food, data science and community participation to explore different ways that we can all help respond to the Climate Crisis.
Working with East and South East Asian (ESEA) communities around London, Low Carbon Chinatown engaged participants through fundamentally enjoyable activities: cooking and eating. Food, with its association to culture, is something we all have in common, breaking down barriers and bringing us all together. In the project, participants worked with notable ESEA chefs to create low carbon alternatives to typical Chinese dishes, exploring different ingredients, cooking techniques and food sources that, in combination, still retained a core essence of Chinese food culture. By presenting these dishes back to the wider public in a pop-up structure built using low carbon materials and processes, we showed how reimagining both food and design can contribute to a more sustainable future.
Low Carbon Food & Climate Workshops
Kicking off in London as our first stop, in this iteration, a group of almost sixty London based East & South-East Asian participants came together over the summer in a series of engagement workshops to experiment with cooking Chinese dishes while reducing its carbon footprint. They collectively develop a set of low carbon (footprint) Chinese food recipes, based on traditional Chinese cuisines that are popular in the UK, with the help of a data scientist Raphael Leung and acclaimed food writers Mimi Aye, Uyen Luu and Shu Han Lee. Visit our Low Carbon Digital Cookbook to learn about the various low carbon dishes that were developed in the participatory process.
Low Carbon Pop-Up Structure
As part of Low Carbon Chinatown, a Pop-Up Structure built from low carbon materials and processes is installed in Chinatown, used to host a series of sit-down tastings featuring low carbon dishes chosen and developed by London’s East and South East Asian communities alongside a data scientist and acclaimed Asian food writers. The Pop-Up is featured as part of London Design Festival.
The low carbon Pop-Up Structure is designed by Ling Tan and designer Usman Haque, both trained as architects, supported by structural engineers Atelier One, fabricated by Gary Campbell and production managed by Nick Murray.
