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At a time when supply chain disruptions continue to slow distribution, consumers embrace healthy eating habits and climate change is expected to affect crop yields, a practice known as controlled-environment agriculture, including indoor vertical farms relying on artificial light and technology, is attracting venture capitalists.
What made moving indoors possible was a drop in price in LED lights, which plunged as much as 94 percent in 2015 from 2008.
— The New York Times
The increasingly popular subsegment of the agriculture industry is expected to grow into a $9.7 billion market share by 2026 propelled by expanding urban populations and a decrease in arable land associated with traditional farming, which is on track to be cut in half by midcentury. Start-ups like... View full entry
Carlo Ratti Associati (CRA) has unveiled a project dubbed “the world’s first farmscraper,” to be built in Shenzhen, China. The 218-meter-high, 51-story Jian Mu Tower will contain a large-scale farm system with the ability to produce crops to feed 40,000 people per year, as well as offices, a... View full entry
Images have been unveiled for a new multi-functional Chinese agriculture and exhibition center that will transform the Nanfan High Tech District in the tropical Hainan Island city of Sanya into a scientific research hub. CLOU Architects is behind the 4,000-square-meter (43,055-square-foot)... View full entry
Deep beneath the streets of Clapham, London, in a former air raid shelter, Steve Dring and his colleagues are farming. Vertical farming, that is.
The company Dring co-founded, Growing Underground, is cultivating a wide range of vegetables and herbs in vertically-stacked trays in the confined space. It’s part of a growing trend in Europe and the U.S.
— Marketplace
Marketplace visits Growing Underground, a cutting-edge vertical farm inside a converted WWII-era air raid bunker 100 feet beneath London. "If we were growing peas out in the open, we’d have three crops a year," the company's cofounder Steve Dring tells the reporter. "Here, we get 62 crops a year... View full entry
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
Eating food that’s grown locally and sustainably is a fantastic and increasingly popular idea, but it’s also expensive. Producers tend to drown under marketing and distribution costs, and struggle to find retail channels for their products. To assume that urban farms can escape that trap because of their extreme proximity to consumers would be a mistake; getting food to consumers has proven a logistical nightmare for them as well. — citiscope.org
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
BOARD's Europan 11 entry for the Dutch city of Deventer suggests abandoning the idea of agriculture in cities. — http://www.b-o-a-r-d.nl/projects.htm
The Europan 11 entry of the Rotterdam based Bureau of Architecture, Research, and Design (BOARD) entitled "Cell Division", suggests giving the spatially magnificent cells in Deventer's famous silo over to apartments containing all the service and facility rooms, such as toilets, bathrooms... View full entry
