XXL City by Cynthia Hathaway

XXL City is a speculative design project by Cynthia Hathaway that explores how scale, food, and sharing could shape the future of urban life. Inspired by Inuit traditions of communal hunting and distribution, the project imagines a city built around giant food production and collective consumption — where abundance is shared rather than owned individually.

By proposing oversized crops and infrastructures to match them, XXL City challenges familiar ideas of efficiency, scarcity, and individual consumption. Instead, it suggests a different urban logic: one based on cooperation, visibility, and shared responsibility. Presented in 2011 as part of Droog’s experimental research platform, the project turns everyday acts like eating and growing food into catalysts for rethinking how cities might function — together, at a much larger scale.