WiserEarth Suggestions

The generalized definition of Urban Farming casts a wide net with many different approaches. Conventional urban agriculture movements have developed in various urban areas and are heavily based on around permaculture concepts.

More radical Arcology themed vertical farming systems seek to create an integrated built environment where people live and work under one roof. The Urban Integrated Farm model is gaining creditability because it offers a way to incorporate various sustainability best practices into one comprehensive approach that provides basic human needs like clean water, renewable energy and the recycling of water. One case that these groups make is that fact that urban areas are densely packed with people makes it illogical that conventional modern agriculture or even sustainable agriculture adapted from traditional farming practices can realistically make urban areas more self-reliant in food production. Dr Despommier's Vertical Farm Project is one interesting effort to explore this possibility of using tall buildings for food production in dense urban environments.

Regardless of whether we realistically envision skyscrapers producing food, the fact remains that urban areas in the age of Peak Oil will have to be more self-reliant in addressing their food, material and energy needs. The idea of a urban farm system that can begin to provide natural resources for sustaining urban environments is significantly less absurd than the hugely unsustainable eco-footprints of these urban centers.

Major Issues about the Sustainability of Urban Centers:

1. Ballooning ecofootprints of modern cities are rapidly chomping up land and natural ecosystems.
2. Social Sustainability in terms of how the urban environment impacts people
3. Heat Island Effect reduces the livability of the city and results from the lack of green plants.
4. Ground, air and water pollution from urban activities such as cars, industrial facilities, etc.

Addressing Human Scale Concerns of Urban Cores

The question is how: how socially sustainable are our cities? While we should always encourage human scale development (avoiding things like multi-level buildings far out of scale with the street-scape on the ground), the very scope of the human reality in highly compact and dense urban environments makes this increasingly difficult and unrealistic to achieve.  Conventional approaches to Urban Farming which include the restoring and converting of blighted areas into farming areas actually help promote more of a human scale aesthetic in urban environments. On the other hand, the more Integrated Urban Farming efforts such as Dr Despommier's Vertical Farming and the Arcology concepts developed by Paolo Soleri, do lend themselves to a type of mega-scale/monolithic form thinking that can be overwhelming in an urban environment. This is especially the case with the Hyper Building (a proposed 1 kilometer tall building to designed to function as a complete and self-contained city for 100,000 people).

Resources:

1. FOOD NOT LAWNS ­on How to turn your yard into a garden & your neighborhood into a community ­
2. Francis Frick’s work on the South China Arcology  is one example of urban agriculture system and how it might work as part of an integrated built environment.
3. Various efforts involving the development of multi-story agricultural systems fit well with the Arcology model developed by Paolo Soleri as well as EcoCity Builders Richard Register’s evolution of that vision in the Book Ecocities: Rebuilding Cities in Balance with Nature.
4. Dr Despommier's Vertical Farm Project is one interesting effort to explore this possibility of using tall buildings for food production in dense urban environments.

Related WiserEarth Portals:

Agriculture and Farming, Gardening,Organic Farming,Urban Ecology,