Loops of Inheritance: The Dinner Series – A Recipe for Future Cities

The Dinner Series is a research-led long-table gathering exploring how values, traditions and knowledge circulate across generations and how these everyday exchanges shape the environments we build. This first chapter begins with food, our earliest teacher and one of the most enduring carriers of culture, identity and memory.

Over the course of a shared meal, guests move through three conversational invitations: where our values come from, how we pass them on and what we want future generations to inherit. Each course becomes a moment to reflect on the rituals, stories and environments that shaped us, and how these lived inheritances influence the way we design, plan and imagine our cities today.

Participants contribute to a live conversation that will be synthesised into a short publication, Chapter 1: Food as Cultural Infrastructure, forming the beginning of a broader research series on collective inheritance, human energy and the everyday practices that underpin sustainable and caring urban futures.

Part dinner, part dialogue, part civic research experiment, The Dinner Series brings together designers, educators, urbanists, students and community members to consider how the values we cultivate in homes, neighbourhoods, classrooms and campuses ripple outward, shaping the culture and future design of our cities.