Carrots among the concrete: the role of urban agriculture As architects and developers plan new developments, they are certainly thinking about roads, parking spaces and footprints, but are they also thinking about productive plantings, the role of rooftop gardens and biodiversity? Almost certainly not. Having visited some great urban agriculture initiatives in the last couple of years, this feels a shame for two reasons. Firstly because urban agriculture is a rapidly growing field, so by leaving it out they’re being left behind - and secondly because they are designing for a future that will very much need it. Urban agriculture is cutting edge. It’s what we need right now. In order to weave urban agriculture, and its potential, into our discussions this month on ‘Reimagining Real Estate’, who better to talk to than André Viljoen and Katrin Bohn, architects, academics and authors of the recently published Second Nature Urban Agriculture; designing productive cities? Their first book, Continuous Productive Urban Landscapes (CPULs), published in 2004, put the idea of urban agriculture onto the agenda of the architectural profession. Things have changed a lot since then. I caught up with them by Skype a few weeks ago. As André told me, the reception when 10 years ago they first suggested to publishers a book on urban agriculture was “agriculture? We do architecture!” The shift since CPULs came out has been remarkable. For instance, the city of Berlin has now adopted an urban strategy that wants to accommodate productive landscapes, and many of the stories of how it is spreading around the world are captured in the book (some Transition initiatives and their work around urban food production make an appearance too). The book is presented as a review of most recent research and projects as well as “a toolkit aimed at making urban agriculture happen”. It succeeds in very richly doing both. Urban agriculture and the New Economy One of the first things that stands out in the new book is the extent to which urban agriculture initiatives, in a similar way to Transition groups, are increasingly looking at building economic viability into what they are doing. I asked Katrin about this trend: “Some of the examples in the book work and do make a living. Only if enterprises manage to do this is there a real future for urban food growing. That doesn’t mean that these commercially viable schemes need to be commercially viable in a profit-oriented way. They can be social enterprises. But what has been noticed in the last 10 years, what is really crucial, is that if we want to maintain the assumption that urban agriculture can change the physical appearance of cities then we need to provide concepts in which agriculture is also an economic factor. It can’t stay community gardening”. For Katrin, the emergence of commercially viable urban agriculture projects around the world gives her, as she put it, “the right to say yes, urban agriculture has been a good idea. Because we can see that these viable versions are beginning to work”. One of the best examples of this, which André pointed to, is Growing Communities in Hackney in London. They have built up an expanding business which involves training, urban market gardens and an evolving model for how London might better feed itself. However, André acknowledged that: “While we can see the emergence of projects which are beginning to be economically viable they’re still very hard work and the people operating them put in a lot of effort. A lot of them have multiple income strands”. As an example, he cited what is possibly the world’s best known rooftop farm, Brooklyn Grange Farm in New York. Their commercial viability comes not just from food production, but from taking a wider entrepreneurial approach. As he told me: “They operated commercially in relation to the amount of food which is good, but they also rent the space out as a space for celebrations, for weddings and parties and events. That’s an important part of their income at this stage. The ones which are working purely on a commercial basis are tending to use hydroponics at the moment on rooftops. They’re lightweight, they grow food very intensively and conventionally, and I think the interesting question is whether hydroponic systems can be converted to aquaponic systems which bring us closer to closed loop systems. The challenges of scaling up Another key to making urban agriculture economically viable, according to André, is its being seen as an integral part of closed loop systems using urban waste for compost and nutrition. As he put it: “If that understanding is made then the possibility for making it commercially viable by thinking of it in relation to waste streams becomes more likely”. But how might we scale this up? I’m intrigued to know how they think we how might most skilfully see urban agriculture more widely adopted by planners and architects as ... buff.ly/1r6uR…
Posted on: Tue, 21 Oct 2014 17:51:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015