Follow the Food: How eating and drinking shape our cities

With the newly opened Torvehallerne Market in Copenhagen as the central case, this chapter discusses how what one might call an urban or perhaps a performative turn within food consumption together with a profound longing for the good life and for belonging to a community as a way of handling the alienation brought forward by globalization creates new political-economic situations for urban design and development leading to an increased privatization of public space under cover of urban regeneration and thoughtful planning for the common good. With an outset in architecture and design theory and history, the chapter discusses recent decades’ commodification of architecture and how architects – though envisioning the good life in sustainable cities – in this respect have come to serve to strengthen a neoliberal agenda in contemporary urban planning.