Global Brooklyn

What do the food cultures of Cape Town, Mumbai, Copenhagen, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv have in common? Despite their geographical distance, in each major city the same aesthetic of kombucha, rough wooden tables, home-roasted coffee and bespoke rough-hewn furnishings can be found in all of them, as part of a new aesthetic sweeping the globe. The aesthetic may be home-grown and rustic but it is all carefully designed and masterfully instagrammed to create a new transnational aesthetic regime of urban consumption. This is the "Global Brooklyn", inspired by the New York borough and influenced by many networked locations around the globe, where consumers participate in the global circulation of visual styles, flavors, practices, and values. This book sets out this phenomenon across different world cities, and argues for a stronger appreciation of design and materialities in shaping food cultures.

Through analysis of the global mobility of high-end aesthetical, consumerist, and production practices, how they materialize and are situated within a variety of local contexts, the contributors look at the connections between food and eating habits and design in order to give a clearer sense of the "positive" and "negative" consequences of the meeting of cultures through globalisation.