Visit the Global Brooklyn Gallery

A new sensibility around eating and drinking has been sweeping the world. It may taste a bit funky like kombucha, look rough like repurposed wood table, and feel honest like brewing a real cup of coffee. But it is also carefully designed and masterfully instagrammed, creating a new transnational aesthetic regime of urban consumption. Welcome to Global Brooklyn, inspired by the New York borough and influenced by many networked locations around the globe, where consumers participate in an unprecedented circulation of visual styles, flavors, practices, and values. A renewed interest for authenticity, craft, and manual labor clashes with issues of gentrification, inequality, and the dynamics of a labor market that puts stability and long-terms plans in questions for the younger generations. Global Brooklyn’s designed materialities and services of rugged genuineness in postindustrial settings both reflect and support its celebration of blue-collar occupations and craft; its shifts in taste judgement toward more “natural” flavors; the reflexive, knowledge-intensive aspect of the practices and strategies of its actors; and its appeals to an ethos of authenticity and anti-corporatization.

Since 2016 Mateusz Halawa, a researcher in the Institute of Philosophy of the Polish Academy of Science in Warsaw, and I have been observing and writing about Global Brooklyn. We published an article about it on the journal Food Culture & Society. Later, we collaborated with ethnographers, designers, professionals, and scholars in various disciplines, hailing from locations as diverse as Mumbai, Cape Town, and Rio de Janeiro, to chronicle the worldwide diffusion of this phenomenon and to make sense of it. Dispatches from around the world point to the centrality of the logics of gentrification and urban renewal, transformations of professions, elevation of craft and the significance of consumption to notions of respectability, worldliness, and the good life. However, in each locale, these problems are inflected by particular histories or conflicts. This  research is now a book that we hope not only provides a collaborative, multi-sited exploration of Global Brooklyn, but also argues for a stronger appreciation of design and materialities in shaping food cultures.