The Economic Perplexities of Urban Agriculture
A recent Financial Times Article, “Multi-storey farms in a city centre near you” sheds light on the political and economic implications of building large-scale, impactful vertical farms in urban centers. Jane Bird speaks with Professor Dickson Despommier of Columbia University, the man who invented the architectural concept of vertical farms in 1999. Despommier cites a student assignment to design prototypes of vertical urban farms in which they discovered that a farm capable of feeding 50,000 citizens would require 30 stories, with the footprint of a football stadium. Fitting vertical farms into the cultural and historic landscape of cities is another challenge. While smaller operations could start in places like schools and government buildings, these projects are not economically reasonable for feeding any significant percentage of an urban population.
“The problem is that nobody has done any proper accounting to see much value is tied up in urban farming….” he explains.
Unless city authorities are prepared to allocate land exclusively for agricultural use, it will not be economic, he argues. “The tomatoes will be too expensive.”
However, Mark Redwood, the program leader of Canada’s International Development Research Centre, spotlights a few global examples of very promising initiatives in Ahmadabad, India; Cairo, Egypt; Lima, Peru; Dakar, Senegal; Fortaleza, Brazil; Ammam, Jordan; Accra, Ghana; Bamako, Mail; and Mexico City. Quite a list! The urban farming projects in these cities range from city-wide school programs that grow produce for supermarkets, to mitigating wastewater contamination in raised bed structures.
Disturbing side note: NO U.S. CITIES ARE IN THE LIST OF PLACES IMPLEMENTING EFFECTIVE URBAN FARMING SYSTEMS.
America, take a hint. The Greening of Our Cities is not only imminent, but crucial for the sustainability, health, and economic stability of future generations!
