US (MD): Urban ag community to take part in friendly competition

Teams of local architects, engineers, real estate developers, Baltimore city officials, urban farmers, and others will compete this June to design and devise the best plan for sustainably growing food in Baltimore. These crowdsourced ideas will contribute to an actual urban agriculture community center to be constructed in Baltimore in the coming years.

The Baltimore Agritecture Workshop will be co-organized by Agritecture.com, an online media outlet focused on urban and vertical farming, and by BMoreAg, a newly formed Benefit LLC whose primary objective is to serve the Baltimore community through revitalization, availability of healthy foods, employment at a living minimum wage, career opportunity, education/training and community pride.

BMoreAg is eager to employ as many as possible from within the community, hoping to benefit residents first. “We’re delighted to announce BMoreAg to the Baltimore Community via this workshop. We invite our constituents to join us for this design charrette,” explained Alex Fisher, Co-Founder of BMoreAg, “And we’re thrilled to see what sort of designs they come up with for our future urban agriculture center,” he added.

The teams will converge at Open Works, a maker space in Baltimore, on June 23rd to meet their teams and begin the design sprint. They will continue collaborating until 4pm on June 24th, when the workshop session will end. At that time, the public will be welcome to join for the free presentation session.

The presentation session will welcome Baltimore City Councilman Leon Pinkett III to deliver a keynote speech. After Mr. Pinkett’s keynote, the teams will present to a panel of three noteworthy judges from the Baltimore Community.

The winning team will be selected based on the feasibility of their urban farm concept, as well as how their concept decreases resource consumption and increases social cohesion. Immediately following the presentation session will be a networking session.

The Agritecture Design Workshop concept first debuted in New York City in December 2014. The Baltimore Agritecture Workshop will be the 9th such workshop in a 9th different city.