ReGen Village

It's no secret that today's aggressive agricultural techniques can take a heavy toll on the environment, both on the land used for crops and livestock, and in the surrounding atmosphere.

But a new vision of a more sustainable 'integrated neighbourhood' community is being implemented in the Netherlands, with the first of a series of high-tech farm villages set to be completed next year. The project, being built just outside of Amsterdam, is the brainchild of California-based developer ReGen Villages, and after its pilot community is finished in 2017, the company plans to bring the concept to Sweden, Norway, Denmark, and Germany.

READ MORE

OAXIS

Most Gulf countries import up to 90 percent of their food, which neither bodes well for food security no climate change – since the food that is brought in from Europe and elsewhere has a lot of what are called “food miles.” True to their name, Forward Thinking Architecture proposes a solar-powered hydroponic food belt as a solution.

Acknowledging that they are not designing anything new – because there are already several projects throughout the Arabian peninsula that utilize the sun and hydroponics to deliver food in the desert. One project that comes to mind is the Sahara Forest Project which has received a great deal of international press.

The OAXIS system aims to fuse existing technology in a modular, linear arrangement. The growing medium will consist of prefabricated and recycled steel structures equipped with super efficient irrigation technology that uses roughly 80 percent less water than most farms require. Rooftop solar panels provide energy not only for the architecture itself, but also to power artificial LED lighting that will help promote greater crop growth.

READ MORE

retirement farms

Spark Architects won the “experimental” category at the 2015 World Architecture Festival, held earlier this month in Singapore.

The practice’s “Home Farm” aims to deal with two of the main issues facing cities in Asia: an ageing population and excessive food imports.

The idea is that elderly residents can occupy themselves with growing crops in “vertical farms” contained within buildings, thereby providing the city with food and themselves with a modest income.

Occupants can work as part-time agriculturalists, but there is no obligation to work.

Spark say that 90% of Singapore’s meals are imported, so action is needed to improve food security.

READ MORE

Corn Is as High as a Cabdriver’s Eye

But Mr. Santana, 66, and other Seaman drivers spend their downtime tending a small farm off Johnson Avenue in the Spuyten Duyvil section of the Bronx, near Riverdale.

“It was just a few guys,” Daniel Montes, a driver, said of the farm’s origins. “They just got together and started doing this.”

The farm began about 15 years ago with a few tomatoes and beans planted along a thin, unused strip of land behind a 30-story apartment building. It has grown into a thicket that stretches about a quarter-mile.

ReAD MORE

Canada Green Roofs

The city bylaw requires green roofs to be 80 per cent covered three years after planting. If you're harvesting crops every season, the green roof is periodically naked while the new crops grow, and this breaks the law, Throness explained.

“I think the fear was that edible plants would take too much labour and water,” and the city wanted to give developers a low-maintenance solution for building green roofs, Throness said. “But we’ve been monitoring our water use and don’t require any more.”

After a pilot project in 2013, last summer the roof hosted a five-crop rotational farm that produced more than two tonnes of vegetables, she said. “We’ve found that we can grow everything here.”

The harvest is split between campus kitchens and the Gould St. farmer’s market on Wednesdays.

Ontario imports billions of dollars of produce from California each year and this supply is becoming threatened due to the state’s prolonged drought, said Throness. Rooftop agriculture adds local food security to the existing environmental benefits of green roofs.

For Peck, while rooftop farms aren’t appropriate everywhere — older buildings often can’t handle the extra weight — they’re an essential part of the future of the city.

“There are still hundreds of millions of square feet of roofs in Toronto that could still be greened,” Peck said. “We invest billions and billions of dollars on grey infrastructure. It would pay great dividends to devote a small part of that to green infrastructure.”

By the numbers:

72,020: Square metres of green roofs built in Toronto in 2014

232,000: Square metres of green roofs already in existence

185,000: Additional square metres approved.

4,984 hectares: Land area identified as the total available area for green roofs in the City of Toronto, about 8% of the total.

20 %: Minimum area that must be covered by green roof on new buildings.

2 tonnes: Amount of produce produced by a 929-square-metre farm on the roof of Ryerson University’s George Vari Engineering and Computing Centre last summer.

READ MORE

Architecture and Food

Specialist Design Consultancy dedicated to developing the architecture of Building Integrated Agriculture.

We work with building owners and developers to unlock value in their sunlit roofscapes and concept designs for new-builds by developing a model of horticultural production infrastructure supplying local markets and consumers with fresh produce.

Once roofscapes are activated and relationships with their hosts are negotiated and agreed, A&f will form branches of sister company * Hyperlocal to take on the horticultural operation. We hope to eventually develop London's own indigenous, high-volume, resilient food production capacity supplying fresh produce at stable prices, free from supply-side volatility, over the long term.

Urban Agriculture is a field steadily gaining attention for its commercial and social opportunities. We believe it will be a major influence on the development of architecture and a powerful tool in urban food security, community development and climate change adaptation.

READ MORE

farm-x modular vertical farm

food production has historically occurred in areas of low real-estate interest, far from densely populated settlements or cities. ‘farm-x’, by zurich’s conceptual devices, is a modular vertical farm concept that shifts the historical dichotomy between food production and consumption. the facility is able to grow up to five tons of fresh food per day in its 1000m2 area using specific hydroponic farming techniques and full climate control.

ReAD MORE

UT Food Lab

The Food Lab (TFL) is based in The School of Human Ecology, College of Natural Sciences at The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin). The Food Lab provides awareness of food issues, encourages and motivates students to engage with innovative food systems research, and provides support to startups that leverage university research. TFL is a catalyst for scientific and cultural exploration, experimentation and innovation in the food system.

We thrive on unexpected connections between all disciplines and support collaboration at UT Austin nationally and internationally. On this site you’ll find more about the TFL’s existing initiatives and research projects, information about events for further learning, and resources for those pursing food related start-ups.

LINK

Robyn Metcalfe: The Food Lab is a project currently located in the College of Natural Sciences within the School of Human Ecology. It’s really a project that engages broadly across the whole campus within a wide range of disciplines including history, engineering, architecture, anthropology, American studies and the sciences. It really engages the university in a conversation about the future of food. We have a couple of projects. One is the food challenge prize that took place Feb. 14. We are also doing some research on the relationship of cities and food and how food travels around the world — food logistics. We have a website and online magazine related to that. 
LINK

Paris 2050

"The plan for Paris Smart City 2050 proposes eight different types of towers. In brief: Mountain Towers, situated on the rue de Rivoli, uses solar power to create energy and purify water. The Antismog Towers repopulate old railroad tracks with greenery and housing whose energy needs are powered by wind. The Photosynthesis Towers repurpose a Montparnasse tower into a carbon-neutral vertical park. The Bamboo Nest Towers are an exoskeleton aimed at ecologically restructuring buildings in the Massena area. The Honeycomb Towers offer a model for affordable housing in which residents have vegetable gardens, hanging orchards, and solar power. The Farmscrapers Towers, are, as their name suggests, spaces for growing food. The Mangrove Towers aim to neutralize the ecological effects of the Gare du Nord train station, through which 700,000 travelers move each day; their photo-electrochemical skin and titanium-dioxide material can actually absorb and disintegrate smog molecules. Finally, the Bridge Towers offer new residential, business, and transit spaces that link different city districts."

LINK

Most popular crop per state

"What crop generates the most money in each state? The Department of Agriculture's National Agricultural Statistical Service produces reams of data on such matters, so I figured the question would be easy to answer. But it turned out to be trickier than I thought, because when I pulled the data, I realized that in most states, the biggest crop was one that was used mostly for animal feed. For well over half the states, field corn, soybeans or hay was the crop that generated the most cash in 2012, the latest year for which data are available. Though a small share of some of these crops does eventually get eaten by humans, in the form of things like soy lecithin and high-fructose corn syrup, most of it is fed to animals raised for meat or dairy."

"To get more meaningful results, I decided to strip away those crops that are used largely for animal feed, and focus on crops that people actually eat. I plotted the results on a map, which revealed some surprising trends:"

LINK

more edible architecture

mini metropolises made of food comprise brunch city series
 in Design on January 26, 2015
the quirky series reminds city inhabitants of the overlooked cultural connection between their urban surroundings and the food that defines it.

LINK

Food Webs

"Dr. Samuel Johnson, from Warwick’s Mathematics Institute, explains: “Buildings require structural supports, such as the metal or timber frames around which they are then built. For the building to remain standing, though, these supports need to comply with the laws of mathematics and physics; if the roof is too heavy for the frame, the building collapses. The frames also need flexibility to adapt to conditions, if they are too rigid they become fragile and, for instance, unable to cope with difficult weather.

“The same is true of natural ecosystems; they need support and structure. Trophic Coherence seems to play a similar role in ecosystems as supporting frames of buildings — it is a structural property that helps ecosystems survive, and is common to all the ones we have analyzed. It provides them with essential support and structure.”"

LINK

Visual Complexity

Floating Gardens of Bangladesh

"...three years ago, Ms. Khatun was trained by Shidhulai Swanirvar Sangstha, a Bangladeshi nonprofit organization, to tend an unusual source of food and income: a floating farm with a duck coop, fish enclosures and vegetable garden moored by rope to the riverbank."

Floating farms — and produce that can flourish in flood conditions — are a way to help Bangladeshis live with rising waters.

“There is big demand for solutions for climate change-affected areas,” said Mohammed Rezwan, the founder and executive director of Shidhulai.

With the extra income from selling eggs, fish and vegetables, Ms. Khatun started saving money in a bank for the first time, bought a bed to keep her and her family off wet ground in their dirt-floored home, and helps her husband support the family.

LINK

Urban Bee Hives

Although the drop in mortality is a positive, as is the fact that CCD does not seem to have afflicted Australia, two-thirds of beekeepers surveyed by the USDA still see any losses greater than the 18.9 per cent level as unacceptable and non economically sustainable. 

All of these statistics highlight a threat to bee colonies which will in turn affect global food security, agriculture jobs and pollination across the green environment. These statistics have prompted architects to create sustainable structures to house bees particuarly in urban areas. 

Many of these projects are designed to replicate the “hive” environment. Norwegian design firm Snøhetta’s Vulkan Beehive is made up of two birch veneer hexagonal volumes that aim to house bees while also educating city inhabitants on the current threat of CCD. 

LINK

Value Farm

"Value Farm creates value by cultivating the land as a collective effort. The project intersects issues of urban transformation, architecture and urban agriculture with an international cultural event, and explores the possibilities of urban farming in the city and how that can integrate with community-building. It forms part of the Shenzhen Hong Kong Bi-city Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture 2013, within Ole Bouman’s Value Factory located at the Shekou Former Guangdong Glass Factory in Shenzhen, a site that is itself undergoing radical transformation. Responding to the Biennale’s theme of ‘Urban Border’ and Shekou’s post-industrial regeneration, Value Farm is realized as new architectural and landscape design providing permanent infrastructure for the site’s future as well as a substantial piece of performative, growing event-architecture throughout the biennale."

LINK

Tree Farm like Building

"Our version of the vertical farm was intended to become an independent, open-to-air structure which would be purely focusing on farming activities and sustainable functions such as generating renewable energy and performing air, and water filtration," say architects Steve Lee and See Yoon Park.

LINK

Urban Farms - Denver

The city passed an ordinance Tuesday designed to enable urban farmers to sell their crops from home, taking advantage of Colorado's 2012 Cottage Food Act.

LINK

Edible Geography

Edible Geography is a blog written by Nicola Twilley, a freelance writer currently based in New York City.

LINK

New Ark

"WORKac and MVRDV together provided films for “Pioneers of Change” on Governor’s Island in 2009. While MVRDV examined producing all of New York City’s food on rooftops (resulting in an average of 60-stories of farming on every roof) WORKac looked at producing the city’s food organically and sustainably within a 100-mile radius of the city.

Through diet changes, strategic reorganizing of rural and coastal areas, the elimination of suburban sprawl and the creation of a “mega-agropolis” by moving 6M people into “New Ark” – made by combining Newark and Jersey City - 20.5M people can be fed."

LINK

First Supermarket