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| 15.05.2008 | ||
As we have learned when we were focussing on mega-cities, by 2050, an estimated two-thirds of the world’s population will live in urban areas, imposing even more pressure on the space infrastructure and resources of cities, leading to social disintegration and horrific urban poverty. To grow enough food to feed the people, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today, an estimated 109 hectares of new land (this about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed. Today, almost all of the fertile ground all over the world is in use. New solutions have to be developed to avoid an impending disaster.
A potential solution to approach the problem is skyfarming. Skyfarming or vertical farming is a conceptual form of agriculture done in urban high-rises. In these high-rises (also called "farmscrapers") food such as fruit, vegetables, fish, and livestock can be raised by using greenhouse growing methods and recycled resources year-round, allowing cities of the future to become self-sufficient.
This concept of indoor farming is not new, since hothouse production of tomatoes, a wide variety of herbs, and other produce has been in vogue for some time. New is the urgent need to scale up this technology to accommodate another 3 billion people.
It is Columbia University professor Dickson D. Despommier, Professor of Public Health in Environmental Health Sciences (and Microbiology), who has established The Vertical Farm as a theoretical construct to look at the possibility of agricultural sustainability within cities. The idea grew out of a class project to measure the effects of rooftop gardening in New York City on reducing the dome of heat that develops over us each year. From that original idea, he expanded the concept to include urban agriculture and finally to multi-story indoor farming. The Vertical Farm concepts have been brought into the world spotlight starting with an article that featured Dickson’s Vertical Farm concept in New York Magazine and designs by Chris Jacobs (Creative Director of United Future, Los Angeles).
Rendering of a farmtower © Dean Fowler
The potential advantages of vertical farming would be the prevention of deforestation, desertification, and other consequences of growing agricultural land use. By producing food within population centers, less pollution is produced transporting the food from distant farms. The controlled environment of a greenhouse may also allow greater crop yields and reduced need for pesticides, herbicides, and fertilizers. As currently envisioned, the vertical farm would also be designed to turn sewage into fresh water, generate its own electricity from decomposition by products, and be virtually self sufficient.
What do you think about skyfarming? Could this be a sustainable solution to solve the impending problem that will come up to us? Is this something that we will find in the city of the future?
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Actually, if 2/3 of the world’s population did live in cities, there would conciderably LESS pressure on agracultural land. Maybe not the land immediately abutting cities, but the depopulating effect on rural land would be a boon to agraculture.
The notion that one would build vertical urban farms, by ANY economic calculation, would either acutely over-value arable area (while the countryside is depopulated) or so under-value the high-rises that people DO live in, that they would be undercomoditized to the point of having no value in a warm and fuzzy, “Clockwork Orange” kind of way.
In fact the only way you could have such “farm towers” if people really didn’t need them, or some sort of totalitarian management got the idea in their illiberal little heads that they had to “fit the plan”.
Joe Noory
I find this a great idea, especially if it is possible to mangage this agricultural idustrie economical efficient. You have the advantage to produce near by the consumer. I hope that european big cities will try to turn the idea in reality. When the result is O.K. you will have a new export industry.
I wrote a german article about this topic:
http://www.cireview.de/stadtprojekte/vertical-farm-das-hochhaus-als-bauernhof/
Alexander Venn
I think this is a good sulution for future scenarios of urban living, when energy efficient resource management is burnt into everyones head and the developed world reached a point of self preservation without beeing depended to developing countries for food delivering, because they cannot handle it any more or they are just completely puluted. I am talking about far future.
Nowadays this model could be tested in overcrowded areas, e.g. asian countries with millions of inhabitants.
The problem could be building a gigantic and cheap high-rise building with management expenses not higher than a watered farm.
Such a high-rise farm should be a construction-kit in mass-production.
In this case, food prices could remain stable with rising world population.
But in reality I am sure, mankind would just re-act to changing world conditions, not pre-act.
e.g.
- climate change/ world is getting warmer?
- atomic energy/ what about atomic rubbish?
- limited energy sources/ rising prices?
Until then economy has advantages of these changes, nothing will happen.
Alexander Majonek