The future of agriculture is a much debated issue: eco-footprint, spatial footprint, bio-mass and bio-fuel production, …
A recent BBC article relaunched the idea of vertical farming. Think: skyscrapers built to grow and process food on location, e.g. downtown Manhattan (instead of importing it by land, sea or air). Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier sees several advantages:

• Year round crop production in a controlled environment
• All produce would be organic as there would be no exposure to wild parasites and bugs
• Elimination of environmentally damaging agricultural runoff
• Food being produced locally to where it is consumed
• [...] vertical farming would allow some existing traditional farms to be returned to natural forests. Good news in a time of global warming.

Many people in the low countries will experience it as a kind of déjà-vu. The idea is reminiscent of the Dutch architectural firm Maas-van Rijs-de Vries’ (better known as MVRDV) pig cities.

Image courtesy of MVRDV

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 22:04 and is filed under design, envision, future, projects, sustainability, visions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.