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.

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Urban Forest

Italian architect Stefano Boeri dreams big and green. He has created six bold, transformational "ideas for a bio-diverse metropolis" that could be installed in and around the city of Milan, to establish "transitional states between the city, nature and agriculture" and provide "energy sources for a new model of urban economics." Visionary and Idealistic, they challenge us to think about cities and the possible in new ways. The concepts were first introduced to the public at an exhibition in Rome last year.

While all about landscape and greenery, BioMIlano is also about urbanist revitalization and putting a stop to sprawl. The key philosophy seems to be taking advantage of creative opportunities to green the urban core while also developing a greenbelt around the city.

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Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. — The University of Arkansas Community Design Center’s project Fayetteville 2030: Food City Scenario has won a 2015 Honor Award in the Analysis and Planning category from the American Society of Landscape Architects. The project seeks to build food sustainability by promoting local urban agriculture.

Food City Scenario is featured in the October issue of Landscape Architecture Magazine and will be exhibited at the ASLA Annual Meeting and Expo in Chicago in November. This is the Community Design Center’s seventh ASLA Honor Award.

The Community Design Center led an interdisciplinary team at the University of Arkansas for Food City Scenario, which speculates on what Fayetteville might look like if the city’s growth integrated local urban food production sustainable enough to create self-sufficiency. Fayetteville’s population of 75,000 is expected to double over the next 20 years. In addition, although the region is the most prosperous in the state, it also has one of the nation’s highest child hunger rates.

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Vincent Callebaut Masterplan

The extensive use of trees throughout the rooftops and balconies not only beautifies the district, but aids in its self-sufficiency. These communal gardens provide residents with self-renewing sources of food, helping to locally produce the city’s necessities. Additionally, these orchards provide extraordinary environmental benefits, including CO2 filtration and harmful particulate removal, for a healthier atmosphere.

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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."

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vertical greenery

"Architects and developers continue to inject greenery into high-rise buildings as the concept becomes far more common.

Beyond adding greenery to balconies, roof terraces or on the walls of skyscrapers, however, there is also a trend toward using building surfaces for urban agriculture as rapid urbanisation creates demand for affordable inner-city housing and accessible food. 

A 2014 United Nations report foresees an additional 2.5 billion people (66 per cent of the population) moving into urban areas by 2050. With this comes the opportunity to produce food in the heart of these urban areas through vertical farming"

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the markthal in rotterdam

led by developer provast and designed by architecture office MVRDV, the structure combines two dissimilar program types, composed as a housing building which arches over an indoor market hall. the facility offers public access for eating, drinking, and shopping, while also accommodating 228 apartments featuring externally facing balconies.

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Edible Geography

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

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Open Food Booklets

OPEN FOOD booklets promote participation in local and urban food systems. 
Each booklet in the series introduces a different slice of local food, opening eyes to the importance and possibility of becoming a part of your food system.  

#1. Farms & Gardens Build Urban ValuePublished March 2014
#2. Landscape to Table: a guide to edible outdoor spaces
Published July 2014

By The Community Food Lab

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Healthy Corner Stores

"Food deserts, defined by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) as ‘urban neighborhoods and rural towns without ready access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food,’ are a significant problem in North Carolina."

"According to data available from the USDA Food Access Research Atlas, North Carolina has at least 349 food deserts across 80 counties. Over 1,544,044 residents live in these food desert zones. Residents living in food deserts are more likely to suffer from obesity, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other diet-related conditions, while simultaneously being more likely to be food insecure."

By increasing healthy food option in corner stores, healthy corner stores are created that can in fact bring change to the food access landscape. Healthy corner stores have been shown to have many benefits, including increased consumption of healthy food, changes in food shopping behaviors, and new markets for local farmers. Our hope in sharing this work is that this guide adds valuable information and replicable models for solving the complex problem of inadequate food access for the central North Carolina region and beyond. - The Community Food Lab

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Farmers Market Pop-ups

The AIA’s Small Project Practitioners Knowledge Community developed the Pop-Up Project Design Competition with the goal to re-imagine the farmer’s market canopy pop-up booth to make it easier for produce vendors to set up and transport their canopies and produce, while also helping them sell their product.

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Community Food Lab

Community Food Lab provides services such as community engagement, mapping and assessments, urban and project design investigations, charettes, trainings, and feasibility studies. We bring value to clients and partners in the form of realistic design recommendations and collaborative capacity building that deliver the multiple benefits of local food systems.

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Austin Food Deserts

Research involving data collection and visuallizing that information from UTSOA

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Situating Food: Planning and Design for New Urban Food Systems
November 8, 2013 - 2:00pm to November 9, 2013 - 8:00pmABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM
OBJECTIVE

Situating Food: Planning and Design for New Urban Food Systems will identify models and foster innovation along with criticism of issues that impact food security, food justice, production, access and cultural awareness, especially as they influence trends in urban revitalization.

Champions of the local food movement have held it up as a potential economic boom to urban populations, a step toward the true reformation of the industrial food system and catalyst for neighborhood identity, social cohesion, and urban resilience or rebirth. Simultaneously, emerging critics have decried such efforts as a paternalistic attempt to 'save' central city populations as gentrification displaces current residents and property values increase. Divergent discourses on the subject make the topic of local food a socially, politically, economically, and ecologically charged topic in need of discussion and healthy, inclusive models.

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NYC - the garden

What if NYC grew all it's own food? A project by Terreform Research Group visualized just that question. These visualizations look at what the city would look like if it grew all it's own food. These questions of what urban agriculture would look like have been in the design consciousness for some time now. The argument still stands, and logistics are far from a reality, but really, can we do it, should we do it? The current model of urban and rural, suburban are not contributing to this issue.

Some questions: What are our current eating habits? How have they changed in the past 100 years? What could the next 100 years of eating habits look like? What is a gluten-free-paleo city?

What infrastructure of CSA's and community gardening efforts look like and what systems already feed into the city that could link up (ie, Amtrack, MTA, cargo ship?). Sexy images are fun to share and imagine...but that arugula sprout on 147th street?

How about a library of what can be grown, when it can be grown? Getting more specific with the food item and the diet and the climate...perhaps that could inform the new green city.
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Farmers to Urbanites

I have been following this mass population migration in China of rural farmers moving into cities and the governments initiative to make it happen. Here, another report seeking to have 60% of the population living in a city brings more than a number of questions and issues. Food, the people that grew it, the land, the cities and the food it needs. So many opportunities.

When I was living in Chongqing in 2001-2002 I traveled down the Yangze River just prior to the massive relocation. A number of villages were be completely relocated to make way for the raising waters of the Yangze dam. Traditional, ornate, sustainable villages were being uprooted to concrete, high rise cities that may have an updated infrastructure, but lacked a deep sense of place and tradition. One of those being local subsistence patterns and small scale farming.

Enter the creative solutions of people moving from rural to urban. Chickens in the bathroom to farming on the sidewalk...so many lessons to be learned and design opportunities for these new cities housing a population living between two worlds.

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