Locally-grown food in the middle of New York City
New York Magazine asked four architects to design whatever they would like for a full city block of space with no clients to worry about. One design offered was a vertical farm, complete with water tanks and each floor would be used for the cultivation of a different crop. Amale Andraos, of Work AC, the firm responsible for the intriguing idea, said in the article that they “are interested in urban farming and the notion of trying to make our cities more sustainable by cutting the miles [food travels].”
Ok, maybe that’s taking sustainable design to an extreme; does anyone have more eco-friendly (and preferably profitable) ideas?
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I am not a huge fan of the whole food miles issue as it is often missleading - however, the idea of a city farm is not necessarily unprofitable.
Such a farm in the city would become a tourist attraction in its own right, and I would expect most of the cropping to be done by the customer (pick your own fruit, etc) - so labour costs would be lower than a traditional farm.
It would almost certainly be a novelty and not a "solution" to the food miles debate, but I am fairly sure that a few of these in each city would still be profitable.
I was looking at one speculatively recently in London, as the heating costs could be almost free by basing the vertical farm above a deep level London Underground train line. The railway is desperate to expell warm air, and that could be cheaply pumped up to the greenhouse to heat it for a negligable cost.
Posted by: Ian Mansfield | Apr 18, 2008 5:31:24 AM
Here's an idea; perhaps not for inner cities, but for business parks, university campuses, etc. Provide allotments - this would give staff and students an opportunity to grow their own food, get some exercise, and reduce the costs of maintaining lawns and shrubberies. It might even create some empathy with subsistence farmers.
Posted by: Michael Saunby | Apr 18, 2008 5:36:39 AM
This is a fairly radical thought, but recently appeared in a Discovery Channel article , so I thought I'd mention it. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon found that beef produces far more greenhouse gases than any other type of plant or animal food (regardless of place of origin). In other words, even local steak is worse than Argentinian asparagus. Choosing local foods can't hurt, but decreasing meat intake would be better.
For cities, I like the idea of growing tilapia in vats, and feeding them algae.
Posted by: Anastasia Bodnar | Apr 19, 2008 12:14:55 AM
A vertical farm isn't "extreme" any more than the interstate highway system was "extreme" at the end of WWII. A bold new idea, sure, but entirely doable. We've engineered far harder things. New ideas need to be explored rather than immediately tossed off as impractical and weird. In a world where farmland is scarce and deforestation is the primary means of expanding it, innovative ways of creating new acreage should be lauded, not leered at.
As far as the food-miles issue, the fastest way to reduce CO2 from transport of food (or any other good) isn't in land engineering, it's in fuel efficiency and getting clean energy into vehicle powerplants.
Posted by: Scott W | Apr 20, 2008 1:37:54 PM
I don't understand why growing food in cities is "taking sustainable design to an extreme".
There are plenty of post-industrial towns and cities in the developed world that have land with nil value - and that could be valued differently in a sustainable, self-sustaining world.
Take an eagle-eyed view of the possibilities, start to till left over space and you start to build a map dotted with opportunities for agriculture.
See the Middlesbrough map here:
http://tinyurl.com/2843d9
Posted by: David Barrie | Apr 21, 2008 4:38:21 AM
A vertical garden of glass structures in the middle of NY is possible, but such structure should not be too close to other skyscrapers, rather beside public parks. Plants and vegetables even in hydroponics farm need sunlight. Skyscrapers will block sunlight for the vertical hydroponics garden.
The bottom floor for this structure should be for crops that don't need much sunlight like ginger.
Posted by: Nonoy Oplas, Philippines | Apr 22, 2008 1:16:09 AM