Gingerbread has long had a place in European folk culture and cuisine. It's particularly popular at Christmas.

There are various recipes but its main ingredients of ground ginger, cinnamon, flour, egg, sugar and butter combine to produce an easily mouldable mixture which lends itself to some simple forms of representative art. 

In 1487 the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III tried to improve his public image by having 4000 gingerbread models of himself given to the children of his domain. Elizabeth 1 of England had life-sized gingerbread mannequins made to honour valued guests of her court.

Young women in the middle ages apparently used gingerbread men to attract the real thing as husbands.

Best-known, though, are the children's nursery rhyme about a runaway gingerbread man and the fairy tale of Hansel and Gretel, which centers on the fate of two children who stumble on a witch living in a gingerbread house. 

All this is a way of explaining why architects - members of a serious profession, after all -  would spend time making an entire city out of gingerbread. But that's what they did in an exhibition organised by the Museum of Architecture in London.

More than 100 architects and designers were asked to design a future city, focussing on transport ideas in our crowded urbans environments, with the models constructed entirely of gingerbread.

You can see the results in the video attached to this story.