We Are How We Eat: Turning London's Nine Elms into a Living Food Ecosystem

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Q: What is "We Are How We Eat: Turning London's Nine Elms into a Living Food Ecosystem" about?

This article covers topics related to Urban Design, Urban Planning. A runner-up entry in Urban Meal Mine reimagines the New Covent Garden Market as an interconnected landscape of farms, markets, and learning.

A runner-up entry in Urban Meal Mine reimagines the New Covent Garden Market as an interconnected landscape of farms, markets, and learning.

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UNI published Blog under Urban Design, Urban Planning on Aug 31, 2025

Food is infrastructure. It shapes logistics networks, determines land use, and dictates daily rhythms for millions of urban residents. Yet most cities treat food as a consumption endpoint, severed from the systems that produce and distribute it. We Are How We Eat takes this disconnect as its starting point, proposing a wholesale market that doesn't just sell food but produces, teaches, and cultivates community around it. The core provocation is deceptively simple: stop asking what we eat and start redesigning how we eat.

Designed by Hùng Trần, Cao Minh, and Đạt Đinh Công, the project was awarded Runner-up in the Urban Meal Mine competition. The site is London's New Covent Garden Market in the Nine Elms District, a location already loaded with history as a wholesale food trading hub. Rather than demolishing and rebuilding, the designers reimagine the market as a permeable urban landscape where greenhouses, hydroponic farms, education platforms, restaurants, and public squares layer on top of existing logistics infrastructure.

A Bridge Between Production and the City

Rendering of an elevated bridge connecting green-clad buildings over a loading yard with trucks and workers

Interior view of a glazed atrium with terraced gardens and children seated on a grass lawn

The elevated bridge shown in the opening rendering does more than connect buildings; it stitches together two scales of urban life. Below, trucks load and unload in a functioning wholesale yard. Above, pedestrians walk through green-clad volumes that house growing spaces and public programs. The contrast is deliberate. Keeping the loading dock operational means the market retains its economic role, while the elevated landscape adds a civic layer that invites residents into a world they rarely see. The green cladding isn't decorative; it signals that the architecture itself participates in food production.

Step inside the glazed atrium and the atmosphere shifts entirely. Terraced gardens cascade down through a light-filled interior where children sit on a grass lawn. This is the Education Zone in action: a space designed to teach citizens about food systems, healthy diets, and ecological practices through direct sensory experience rather than signage. The decision to place a lawn inside a market building is pointed. It collapses the rural-urban boundary, making agriculture feel domestic rather than distant.

Six Phases of Transformation

Axonometric diagram series showing six development phases from existing structure to public space integration

The axonometric phasing diagram reveals a careful developmental logic. Starting from the existing market structure, the design adds layers incrementally: greenhouse roofs, public squares, educational platforms, and finally a fully integrated public realm. This phased approach matters because it acknowledges that transforming a functioning wholesale market cannot happen overnight. Each phase preserves operational capacity while layering new programs on top. By the final stage, the site reads less as a market with additions and more as a new urban district organized around food.

Every Room Serves the Food Cycle

Six perspective renderings showing various interior spaces including courtyard, greenhouse, cafe, market, restaurant, and auction hall

Section rendering showing greenhouse roof, tiered gardens with people, and underground loading dock with trucks

The six perspective renderings present a catalog of interior conditions: a planted courtyard, a productive greenhouse, a café, a covered market hall, a restaurant, and a wholesale auction space. What makes this sequence compelling is its range. The same architectural system accommodates the informal sociality of a café and the hard economics of a wholesale auction. Courtyards become edible landscapes. Greenhouse roofs double as public amenities. No space is single-purpose, and every room connects back to the food cycle in some way, whether through production, education, trade, or consumption.

The section rendering cuts through the full vertical stack of the proposal. A greenhouse roof caps the building, tiered gardens with people occupying them step down through the middle levels, and an underground loading dock with trucks sits at the base. This section is the clearest expression of the project's thesis: that food production, community space, and logistics can be vertically integrated without one compromising the other. The underground dock keeps heavy vehicles away from pedestrian life, while the greenhouse captures daylight and rainwater at the top of the section.

Stacking Programs from Parking to Public Life

Exploded axonometric diagram showing programmatic zones from public spaces and greenhouses to wholesale storage and parking

The exploded axonometric diagram breaks the building into its programmatic layers: public spaces and greenhouses at the top, market and service zones in the middle, wholesale storage and parking at the base. Reading from bottom to top, the diagram maps a gradient from private logistics to collective urban life. Parking and storage occupy the ground that the public never needs to see. The Production Zone, with its hydroponic systems and urban farms, occupies the middle register where controlled environments and natural light intersect. At the top, open-air public spaces and greenhouse roofs create the face of the building, the part that engages the city. The clarity of this separation is one of the project's strongest organizational moves.

Why This Project Matters

Most proposals for urban food systems focus on rooftop farms or community gardens, valuable but limited in scale. We Are How We Eat operates at a different register, taking on the full supply chain from wholesale logistics to household consumption and folding it into a single architectural proposition. By choosing an existing wholesale market as the site, the designers avoid the trap of greenfield idealism. They work with real constraints: truck access, cold storage, trading floors, the unglamorous machinery that keeps a city fed.

The deeper ambition here is behavioral. Architecture becomes a vehicle for changing how people relate to food, not through mandates but through spatial proximity. When you walk past a greenhouse on your way to buy groceries, when your children sit on a lawn inside a market building, the distance between farm and fork collapses. Hùng Trần, Cao Minh, and Đạt Đinh Công have produced a proposal that treats food not as a problem to solve but as a medium through which cities can become more resilient, more legible, and more generous.