neroearth.blogg.se - Farm scapes

#Farm scapes manual#
#Farm scapes series#

Prototype new systems that can be retrofit into existing buildings within the city to enable rooftop farmingīased on the objectives specified above, we decided to phase our project onto a two-stage approach that goes from a macro to a micro implementation (Fig 2).

Understand how more advanced farming techniques, like hydroponics and aeroponics, help us to incorporate farming into the cities.

Understand how can we make use of existing elements like roofs surfaces, residual areas or abandon spaces to re-activate by giving them a new function.

Explore, from a macro level, the potential of a city to produce all the vegetables it produces based on its population growth.

Cities will have to face major issues like the lack of available land for food production where most than 80% of the city area is occupied by buildings the need for quality infrastructure to support centralized growth as 70% of global water consumption is used for farming the need for a well-connected distribution network to get the fresh product to different regions as on average vegetables travel approximately 2,400km from farm to the consumer and finally, a circular way to deal with wastage, as 33% of the world’s food goes to waste every year (Rajkumar, Paulrajan, 2010).īased on these challenges, we want to research and explore, from an urban and architectural scale, different approaches to achieve the following: This also needs to be done sustainably, without compromising food quality, diversity, and most importantly, carbon footprint. Beyond the obvious challenges, cities need to be able to find a new way to produce, distribute, commercialize and process up to 10 times more the amount of food. We narrow the research to the intersection of three major components: Architecture, food production, and increased population. Because of this, we have decided to use this thesis to research and explore the possibilities within the architectural and urban design field to alleviate some of these pressures.

Since then, we as designers, have had the opportunity to focus our efforts on new and alternative ideas that can help us get closer to these goals.

#Farm scapes manual#

This has led the global community to start openly discussing the current and future challenges and put together a comprehensive agenda that serves as a guiding manual to navigate them.

#Farm scapes series#

Thanks to a series of recent developments like the Sustainable Development Goals, driven by the United Nations, these major global issues have been addressed, explored, and communicated at an international level. Governments, policymakers, regulatory bodies, etc, have mostly, for the past decades, turn a blind eye to these matters in regards to more pressing short-term issues. These factors are not just introducing new dynamics to which we need to adapt but also creating new sets of challenges and problems we need to face. The world around us is rapidly changing, affected by multiple factors like climate, politics, technology, and demographics. This research explores the use of existing GIS and open databases to register and map the quantity and quality of the existing rooftops and couple this with the latest computer vision technology to alleviate the man-powered need to complete these datasets. This methodology helped us discover the potential applications at a city level, connected with meso realities of each area, and finally implemented and tested at a micro-level on a real-case rooftop of Kampala, Uganda. The approach of this study spans three different scales: macro, meso, and micro. This study focused on the hidden potential that traditional and informal roof surfaces can have for urban farming in a third-world environment to help alleviate the food production crisis and create micro economy opportunities for low-income communities. Food production, as highlighted in the SDG by the UN, is one of the most pressing challenges that we need to address within the next 10 years. In order to best accommodate this rapid urbanization growth while making cities more sustainable, designers must find creative solutions for the big challenges that are going to arise from this reality. By 2050, 68% of the world population will be living in cities.