Designing cities and factories with urban agriculture in mind

According to theguardian.com, Urban farms are transforming inner city spaces – rooftops, infrastructure, streetscapes, building skin – into generative ecologies that support the lives of people, and pollinators too. They are bringing into cities, and into plain view, the natural systems that sustain urban life.

That is not new, but it is good news. Sowing seeds used to be a sign of civilization, and ancient cities were intensely agricultural. City farms fed densely populated settlements, while agricultural knowledge and custom—the domestication of seeds; mathematics, engineering, and ethics; the preparation and sharing of food—nourished urban culture.

The renewal of urban agriculture offers hope for a more positive, regenerative relationship between natural systems and human communities. From a design perspective, integrating agriculture into urbanism dramatically improves the generative capacity of buildings, landscapes, infrastructure and cities. Planning to grow urban food places leads to essential questions about soil, water, terrain, and climate.

That's what we strived to achieve in India, with the design of a 62,000 square metre Garden Factory for a major manufacturer. Our leading design question was: what if a factory could be a garden of health and productivity?

We found that it can. With a solar array, vegetated air-purification wall, rooftop greenhouses, daylighting and ductless air delivery, the factory will generate or harvest nearly all of its needs: food, oxygen and fresh air for people; carbon dioxide for plants; irrigation water and hot water; electricity and cooling; and both factory and food production jobs. Farm follows function. The building is not simply "a machine in the garden" nor a "garden in the machine". It's alive; the machine is a garden.

Click here to read the complete article at theguardian.com