Architect and thinker on food and cities

She studied architecture at Cambridge University and taught at Cambridge, London Metropolitan, and Wageningen universities and at the London School of Economics, where she was inaugural Studio Director of the Cities Programme. Her lectures on Food and the City, given at Cambridge from 2002-2012, were the first of their kind. A director of Kilburn Nightingale Architects in London, she has collaborated with cities and institutions including Stroom den Haag in The Hague, The City of Groningen, and the MAS Museum in Antwerp, where her work inspired the new permanent exhibition, Antwerp à la Carte. She is a trustee of the Oxford Food Symposium.

She is author of two best-selling books: Hungry City: How Food Shapes Our Lives ( Chatto & Windus, 2008) and Sitopia: How Food Can Save the World (Chatto & Windus, 2020). She is in worldwide demand as a public speaker and her 2009 TED talk has received more than one million views. A Rome Scholar in 1995-96, she won the Royal Society of Literature Jerwood Award for Non-Fiction for Hungry City, and Sitopia was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize. The Ecologist magazine called her a “21st Century Visionary” and in 2020 she was featured in a special edition of the BBC’s The Food Programme.

[Update: February 2021]