Charlotte Malterre-Barthes: Food, Politics, Space

How the political economy of food shapes and impacts the built environment.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes investigates the relationships between food systems and the built environment through the lens of political economy, focusing on the case of Egypt. Food systems and the factors that influence them at social, economical, and political levels affect architecture, urban form, and territorial organisation.The project focuses on Egypt as a paradigmatic case to examine how the food system in general and the grain chain in particular transforms and is transformed by territory.

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes:
is an architect, scholar, and Assistant Professor of Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Malterre-Barthes’ teaching and research interests are related to how struggling communities can gain greater access to resources, the mainstream economy, better governance, and ecological/social justice. Her pedagogy is built on a research-based design approach for identifying urgent aspects of contemporary urbanization. While directing the MAS Urban Design at the Chair of Marc Angélil, Malterre-Barthes has earned her doctoral degree from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. She is the co-author of Housing Cairo: The Informal Response (2016), Some Haunted Spaces in Singapore (2018), and of the recently published Migrant Marseille: Architectures of Social Segregation and Urban Inclusivity (2020). Malterre-Barthes is a founding member of the Parity Group and of the Parity Front, activist networks dedicated to improving diversity and gender equality in architecture.