Sigrids Stue Garden

If we think of the city to be like a vessel, a container of sorts, we could ask questions about it. Starting with obvious ones: how does it look like? What is it made of? Who made it and when? What does it contain?

If we went along with this game of asking questions about the city, we could attempt answering them by starting to imagine the city as a vessel. Perhaps it is a crucible, a shape of a melting pot. A ceramic or metal container traditionally used for smelting that is for obtaining metal from its ore. Often reminiscent of a cooking pot it comes in many different shapes and sizes determined by the process it is to be used for.

The melting pot is a metaphor describing the process of assimilation when diverse society becomes more homogeneous, losing its distinctiveness. What is at stake?

The term “melting pot” was used in United States as a poetic description and the vision for American society grown out of the mix of nationalities, ethnicities and cultures. The play Melting Pot written in 1908 by Israel Zangwill popularized this metaphor in a utopian vision of United States as an ideal republic and a new promised land.

Melting range, melting pot, melting point, melting ice, melting ice-cream. [1]

Arts and design researchers, Loren Britton and Isabel Paehr, investigate melting as a metaphor and as a physical and chemical process where different materials MELT.

Standing here among growing trees, bushes, vegetable gardens, apartment blocks. Seeing people, birds and insects, there is no trace of melting. Rather verbs like ‘growing’ and ‘cultivating’ come to mind. What has grown here? Who has been growing things here?

But let us consider yet another verb altogether and with it another metaphor: “fermenting”.