Future Files:Farming Will Move Downtown
Posted On: 23 April 2007 By: Jay Oatway Filed Under: Farming the Future | Future-Stuff-That-Goes-Ping | Jump the Shark
Everyone is moving to the city. Half the populations of Africa and Asia will be living in urban areas by 2025. The trick is how to get food (still grown in big fields out in the middle of nowhere) to where all the cool new urbanites are crammed together fighting over the last butter croissant at Starbucks.
Recently the Paris-based Agricultural Research Center for International Development (CIRAD) issued a warning that massive migration from rural areas means more poverty in the cities and greater difficulty for more people in finding food. They suggest that one solution is to promote urban agriculture. Urban farms provide not only food, but jobs as well. And they help make cities greener, both literally–with trees and gardens–and by reducing the environmental impacts of transporting food from rural areas.
Edible City, an exhibition currently running at the Netherlands Architecture Institute, shows how cities of the future might think different about farming [via WMMNA]. Ideas include urban agriculture, self-sustaining cities, food miles and closed food chains, not to mention pig apartments:
Pig City’s proposal is to concentrate the meat production in one area. Pigs would be kept in stacked comfortable ‘apartments’ which would make them happy (and thus would mean a better taste for the meat) and save space.
Towers would accomodate pigs on the 87×87-metre floors. Large balconies allow the animals to rummage around under trees outside. A central abattoir is housed in the plinth, and pigs for slaughter are moved in lifts. On top is a fish farm that supplies some of the food needed. Each tower also contains a central slurry-processing plant and a biogas tank, which easily caters for the tower’s energy needs
The Vertical Farms Project has also been in the news recently. They say that by the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers, the population will continue to grow and there just won’t be enough land available to feed everyone (I’m serious about the fights for breakfast at Starbucks–get ready to rumble folks!). The solution Sky Farm:
The time is at hand for us to learn how to safely grow our food inside environmentally controlled multistory buildings within urban centers. If we do not, then in just another 50 years, the next 3 billion people will surely go hungry, and the world will become a much more unpleasant place in which to live.
Now, I live in a a city with a lot of skyscrapers. Currently, floor space in Hong Kong is selling for something close to US$1000 per sq. foot–pricey for farm land. Perhaps we should all start indoor vegetable gardens, and sublet the space to farming migrants moving into town from the big fields of the countryside.
