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By Andrea Pavoni[caption id="attachment_16250" align="aligncenter" width="300"] Courtesy of http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/?page_id=2[/caption] Recipe, in Latin, meant imperative formula of medical prescriptions: take. This normative origin remained when the recipe migrated into the realm of food, as a set of how-to instructions meant to adapt the contingency of cooking to the standard of a given knowledge, generally overlooking the historical conditions and socio-material practices that constituted the recipe in the first place.When joined by the adjective ‘urban’, either in merely rhetorical discourses (as in ‘recipes for a better society’, economy, and the likes), or in specific projects at the intersection between grassroots initiatives and artistic practice, the recipe often maintains this normative, prescriptive and instrumental connotation. Like other similar notions (e.g. urban acupuncture, urban mending, etc), the term ‘urban recipe’ is normally employed metaphorically, to refer to small-scale pragmatic – and at times, one may polemically add, technocratic – solutions seemingly able to bypass more complex (political) approaches.In this issue of lo Squaderno we invite you to unpack the key relation of recipes with the embodied and sensorial practice of producing, making, and tasting of food. This is all the more topical as today ‘food’ has arguably become a key driver of urban planning, regeneration and gentrification, as the rise and rise of an ‘urban creative-food economy’ and the implementation of ‘food policy councils’ around the world (e.g. Toronto, Vancouver, Bristol, Amsterdam etc.) testifies.From specialty coffee premises to organic food shops, from beer districts to farmer markets, from TripAdvisor to UberEats, from food waste recycling to urban gardening, the food-city relation is being reshaped, reterritorialised and prolonged in multiple novel ways. In short, there is (increasingly) a profound socio-spatial relation between food and the city that requires some careful unpacking: to do so, recipes may be employed as a sensorial way to explore, know and engage with the perceptible and imperceptible constitution of the city.We therefore propose to rethink (urban) recipes as tools to increase sensory perception and knowledge of the structures, dynamics and everyday experiences of the urban. In other words, the challenge this issue seeks to address is that of reconfiguring the recipe itself, from a normative instrument into a sort of speculative map able to chart and disclose interesting (socio-cultural, political, etc.) dimensions of the relation between food and the city in a particular urban context.We encourage interdisciplinary contributions that narrate, analyse, unpack, or indeed create urban recipes (real or invented, realistic or fantastic, utopian or dystopian, joyful or macabre, artistic or scientific) through which describe, explore or dissect tiny or wide, local or global, issues about the phenomenological and ontological, bodily and structural, spatial and temporal, sensorial and conceptual relation between food and the city...| Deadline for submissions | 30 March 2020| Deadline for abstract submissions | 30 January 2020| Article Size | 2,000 words| Information about the Journal | http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/?page_id=2| Information about the Editorial Process + Author’s Submission Checklist | http://www.losquaderno.professionaldreamers.net/?page_id=1082 