Green roofs are nice, but rooftop farms are better.

They’re the future of living architecture, say international green roof advocates who gathered in Toronto last week. [...]

“We have a handful of agricultural green roofs and all of them are community projects,” like Eastdale Collegiate, Ryerson’s Engineering building and the Carrot Common, said Peck. “But we don’t have any commercial-scale agriculture on roofs — that’s the next thing.” — thestar.com

Floating cities and high rise farms are also predicted to shape Britain’s landscape for future generations, according to some of the country’s leading experts.

In new research they outline the future form of the places where people will live and work.

Spaceports for travel to the Moon and Mars are also expected to become a reality within the next 100 years, they say. — independent.co.uk

Some people might mentally retch that the United Nations, believing the world's population could hit 9 billion by 2050, thinks we should prepare to eat bugs.

Not the folks at Sweden's Belatchew Arkitekter, though: They want to fast-track the insect-munching. Thus they've whipped up plans to build "vermin farms" upon Stockholm's major intersections, so that by 2018 everybody in the city will be guaranteed plentiful rations of six-legged foodstuffs. — citylab.com

As fossil fuels become more expensive and the number of urban dwellers continues to rise, urban farming will help feed the population without increasing the cost and pollution of food transport. [...]

The rise in rooftop farming isn't limited to commercial operations. "Rooftop farming and gardening has become extremely diverse, and in that sense a more 'normal' presence in cities" — news.nationalgeographic.com

Rooftop farms have been established all over the world to enable growing food in dense urban areas. In Japan, a whole new kind of an urban rooftop farm was opened recently. Soradofarm is an urban agriculture project that uses the rooftops of train stations to accommodate urban gardens for waiting train passengers that want to use their transfer time to relax and train their gardening skills. — popupcity.net

One obvious answer to these conundrums is increased focus on "sustainability", along with the questionable notion that because something has a lot of vegetation on it, it must be good for the environment. Accordingly, urban farms are part of this peculiar trend. As early as the mid-1980s, Prince Charles advocated turning the depopulated streets of central Liverpool into farmland, something which seemed connected to his war against modern architecture around the same time... — theguardian.com

When you picture a housing development in the suburbs, you might imagine golf courses, swimming pools, rows of identical houses.

But now, there's a new model springing up across the country that taps into the local food movement: Farms — complete with livestock, vegetables and fruit trees — are serving as the latest suburban amenity.

It's called development-supported agriculture, a more intimate version of community-supported agriculture — a farm-share program commonly known as CSA. — npr.org

In some of Detroit's most deserted and blighted neighborhoods, where residents see little more than hopeless despair, John Hantz spotted opportunity.

The wealthy businessman, founder of Hantz Group, decided to purchase and convert hundreds of acres of vacant city-owned plots into farmland.

It's taken five years, but this week Gov. Rick Snyder approved the sale of nearly 150 acres, 1,500 parcels, to Hantz Woodlands, a private business, for about $500,000. — mlive.com

Some of the most densely populated cities across the globe are tackling population growth and food shortages by establishing more rooftop farms. Vertical farms are popping up on unused rooftops in cities across the globe and the outcome is extremely positive. — DesignBuild Source

Singapore now has its first commercial vertical farm, which means more local options for vegetables.

The technique uses aluminium towers that are as tall as nine metres, and vegetables are grown in troughs at multiple levels.

The technique utilises space better -- an advantage for land-scarce Singapore. — channelnewsasia.com

Architects are tackling the problems of the concrete jungle with ambitious schemes using green technology to grow forests in the sky — ft.com

Agricultural researchers believe that building indoor farms in the middle of cities could help solve the world's hunger problem. Experts say that vertical farming could feed up to 10 billion people and make agriculture independent of the weather and the need for land. There's only one snag: The urban farms need huge amounts of energy. — spiegel.de