The United States is regarded as a nation of abundance, yet millions face persistent and widespread food insecurity. Nearly one in six Americans struggle to secure enough food on a daily basis and 23.5 million Americans are living in food deserts, urban areas lacking access to healthy food within a one-mile radius. These issues disproportionately impact historically marginalized communities, color, where nutritious food is often physically or financially inaccessible. As a result, residents rely on fast food and processed goods, leading to poor nutrition and chronic illness. Such areas, known as food deserts, highlight how food insecurity is deeply tied to geography and systemic inequality.
This project focuses on Austin, a neighborhood in Chicago facing compounded challenges such as high poverty, limited accessibility, and low rates of vehicle ownership, all of which restrict access to fresh food. The aim is to explore how physical, social, and institutional infrastructures shape access to essential resources like food, and to develop a toolkit and design strategy that that empowers communities through bottom-up approaches and engagement.
Through fieldwork, spatial analysis, and a food security framework centered on availability, accessibility, agency, and acceptability, the project identifies critical gaps and opportunities in the neighborhood’s urban fabric. The outcomes design and policy interventions, ranging from small-scale tools to large-scale proposals, each linked to observations in the field.
The project concludes food insecurity must be tackled through systemic urban planning efforts, not just aid or education. Through strategic, multi-scalar interventions, urban planning can help build local capacity, increase access, and promote food justice in neighborhoods like Austin.

With demand expansion and consumption stimulation as fundamental policies for economic growth, China's culture of consumerism has evolved into not only an economic strategy but also a dominant social ideology and a driving force of urban and regional development. In the era of accelerated platformisation, platform corporations exemplified by Alibaba have expanded their influence and established an oligopolistic platform economy that has already reshaped and continues to reshape the culture of consumerism by transforming consumption behaviors, habits, and values. As a result, the production of space and social relations is undergoing a radical transformation.

Building on this premise, this research adopts the Stack as its primary theoretical and design framework to investigate the computational system of the Alibaba corporation in China, with Shanghai serving as a case study. It examines how planetary-scale computation, as manifested through both physical and digital infrastructures, reconfigures geodesign systems across multiple scales, from the territorial allocation of productive resources and the structure and configuration of urban space to human-machine interaction. In doing so, it reveals how Alibaba digital biopolitics facilitates the restructuring of market environments and conditions human subjectivity.

In the design and strategic section, this research further addresses the ethical dimensions of biopolitics within the context of accelerated platformisation. It explores the potential of an affirmative digital biopolitics as a new paradigm, one that centers on the exploration of human futures. In this model, experience becomes a product for customers to consume in the pursuit of a better self, while platform technologies serve as mediating infrastructures that sustain the operational system and enable the enhancement of individual subjectivity. Based on this paradigm, the study speculates a utopian vision of alternative models of production and consumption within the Stack, and envisions future cultures of consumerism shaped by ethical computation and emancipatory spatial and interaction design that foreground situation construction.