High Rise Farms? The New Model for Sustainable Cities

TORONTO, Canada, Apr 3 (IPS/IFEJ) - One of the displays at an exhibition here imagines a Netherlands pig grower who, in some not-distant future, has given up his farm and now commutes to work downtown at a high-rise "Pig City."

The animals he helps to tend, conceived in the "eros room," don’t leave the open-sided, 40-storey sty until they’re slaughtered and processed.

A portion of their feed is grown in or around the building; the rest is waste from nearby food processors. Their manure is converted into fertiliser as well as biogas for heat and electricity.

Some 44 towers could supply all the Netherlands’ pork, say the designers, MVRDV of Rotterdam.

Pig City is the most provocative concept at "Carrot City," a two-month exhibition here devoted to the rapidly growing field of urban agriculture and how it interacts with the design of buildings and spaces. No one is yet prepared to build the sty-scraper, and the exact concept might never fly.

But it and the entire show are inspiring discussion about city "farms" and their role in the coming new world of food production. In both industrialised and developing nations, experts say, humans must begin to nourish themselves with crops and livestock raised in their ever-expanding metropolises.

Populations are growing, arable land is being lost to development, fuels will become expensive and scarce, and greenhouse gas emissions must be cut to curb climate change.

To those concerns add "a crisis of trust" in the current food system, says Joe Nasr, one of three professors at Toronto’s Ryerson University who organised the exhibition. "It’s increasingly showing flaws," he said. Here, warning signs include the recent deadly bacterial contamination of imported spinach, peanuts and pistachios.

These issues, along with unease about chemicals and genetic modification, as well as reduced nutritional value, have sparked interest in local food and the "100-mile" diet, as well as "small plot intensive," or SPIN farming, based on producing organic fruits and vegetables in numerous tiny backyard plots.

In the developing world, food shortages are endemic, and climate change is expected to further reduce production.

The movement to promote urban agriculture began in poorer countries, where it was intended to improve the efficiency of an already widespread practice. Expansion to the industrialised world is recent, although it circles back to older times: A downtown Toronto neighbourhood is known as Cabbagetown because in the mid-1800s, impoverished Irish immigrants grew the vegetable in their patches of front yard.

At the end of World War II, 80 percent of U.S. citizens grew food; potatoes and tomatoes sprouted outside the Roosevelt White House.

The ideas proposed by advocates of urban agriculture - nearly 50 are displayed at Carrot City - range from small and simple to large-scale and high-tech.

Many illustrate actual or potential locations - parks, rooftops, former warehouses and arenas, front and back yards, the vast open areas around many suburban apartment towers and even under elevated expressways.

Others propose products to get more from those areas - easily watered and aerated containers, giant soil-filled bags for temporary sites, low-maintenance chicken coops and vertical planting boxes for walls. A few present designs for projects such as Pig City that amount to large-scale intensive agriculture.

Proponents claim the high-tech concepts would create ideal growing conditions, without risk of crop failure, drought or pests, letting them produce far more food per square metre than conventional farms. A hectare inside a vertical farm proposed for Dubai could match the output of four to six hectares on the ground, its designers say.