with Mateusz Halawa
Our edited book Global Brooklyn: Designing Food Experiences in World Cities (Bloomsbury Academic) is on presale! To celebrate this (for us) exciting milestone, we are sharing a short excerpt from our introduction, where we explain why we chose to call the phenomenon “Global Brooklyn” while acknowledging its more complicated origins. More to come in the next months…
In a past blog post we announced our project on Global Brooklyn, the cultural formation that we identified in restaurants, cafés, food stores, and hotel lobbies around the world. The edited book, which will be released in January 2021, is finally on presale on Bloomsbury UK (our publisher), Amazon, and Barnes & Noble, among others. Thanks to our fabulous contributors, we have observed this recurring, loosely codified set of material objects, constructed environments, practices, and discourses in cities worldwide. They may or may not appear at the same time, in similar patterns, or even with the same meaning, but they have become visible in places as diverse as New York City, Rio de Janeiro, Copenhagen, Accra, and Mumbai, just to mention a few of the locations covered in the book chapters.
To celebrate this (for us) exciting milestone toward the publication of the book, we are sharing a short excerpt from our introduction, where we explain why we chose to call the phenomenon “Global Brooklyn” while acknowledging its more complicated origins. More to come in the next months…
“In Madrid, Montreal, or São Paulo, the aesthetics and the sensory landscapes connected with what we call Global Brooklyn are frequently mentioned with reference to the New York borough, which for better or worse has raised to worldwide fame as one of the main epicenters of and models for food-related trends, whether they actually originated there or not. Part of Brooklyn’s visibility is its symbolic role as the anti-Manhattan, a place where immigrants and working class groups of various ethnicities were able to make a living.
If the public perception of Manhattan speaks to an outdated “world-is-flat” imaginary of globalization, contemporary Brooklyn suggests an alter-global, diverse mode of worldliness. Moreover, in the late 1990s and early 2000s Brooklyn offered comparatively affordable rents to both entrepreneurs and their customers, facilitating the emergence of enclaves where Global Brooklyn-style establishments thrived, often located in abandoned industrial buildings and in less than desirable neighborhoods.
Inevitably, Brooklyn’s reputation is built on the global pervasiveness of US media, from TV to cinema, that made the location a recognizable point of reference for popular culture worldwide. It is an imagined territory rather than an actual place; the less savory realities of gentrification, ethnic tensions, unemployment, and urban decay are strategically written out to allow consumers around the world to superimpose their desires, aspirations, and preferences. These are in themselves inevitably the result of negotiations between local socio-cultural contexts and the circulating imaginaries provided by US media companies. The New York City borough has become central in the contemporary collective imagination, especially for generations that aspire to embody the same coolness and trendiness they see projected onto it.
The Global Brooklyn we evoke in this book is a floating signifier, whose always-changing meanings and relevance within a cultural system are never fixed but rather constantly negotiated among old and emerging centers of interest and forces vying for cultural hegemony. We are fully aware that the origins of what we discuss are not directly connected with the New York City borough but are much more complex and dispersed. Among the cities that contributed to its elaboration we can mention Portland, Oregon, with its crafty, ethical project of good living that is so recognizable – at least in the US – to become the target of a whole comedy TV show, Portlandia, which acutely but affectionately takes jabs at alternative and hipster cultures.
In San Francisco, digital and tech culture, a central source of income, generated appreciation for postindustrial materiality, maker culture, and fix-your-bike DIY attitudes. The availability of money among millennials employed in the tech sector supported cafés and other establishments where nomadic clients could sit with their laptops and work. Seattle contributed with its role in the growth of coffee culture in the US, and it offered some interesting experiments in creating alternative models of food consumption, particularly in the punk scene.
Berlin, once described by its own mayor as “poor but sexy,” was also crucial in generating the aesthetics of repurposed, beautiful trash, which embraced the peripheral and reflected its complicated history of cosmopolitanism. As a matter of fact, in Central and Eastern Europe, from Zurich to Warsaw, Berlin may be a more common and understandable reference than Brooklyn, although New York City is still relevant in the shared imaginary. Furthermore, the connection between the aesthetics of Global Brooklyn and the visual approach of the New Nordic Cuisine appear closely related, raising questions about what came first, for instance, in Copenhagen.
All these cities probably played a role as important as the New York City borough in shaping approaches to consumption that constituted a critique of mass production and contributed to the development of the aesthetics and practices of Global Brooklyn, connected with dynamics of gentrification and the North American “food movement”. Following these reflections, we will use Global Brooklyn not to refer to the specificities of a precise place or to claim a single origin for what we are exploring, but rather to describe an aesthetic and a way of consuming food and drink that popular culture and mainstream media have frequently identified with the New York location.”