THEY’VE been touted as solving the problem of urbanisation and how to feed the world’s growing cities. But the high rise farm has been rubbished by some Australian commentators, who claim we have other urban priorities.
We may dream of quitting the rat race and moving to the country, but the reality is that the world’s cities are growing. The UN has estimated that, by the end of this year, more than half the world’s population will be living in towns and cities.
The question of how to feed these growing cities is an urgent one, according to UK food and farming alliance Sustain.
“There’s a lot of space in our towns and cities that is just green desert. It’s there to look at,” Ben Reynolds, the author of a recent report by Sustain, Edible Cities, says. He argues for making cities more self-sufficient, thereby reducing how far food travels and making it easier to get to in times of crisis.
Britain is now leading the way in designing and considering high rise farms (also called vertical farms and farmscrapers), essentially a high rise building with floor after floor of vegetables and grains. Some have poultry or shrimp farms, plants can be grown hydroponically to reduce the weight of soil on the building’s floors. Chickens could be reared organically, albeit never free range.
But Australian landscape architect Adrian McGregor, managing director of McGregor and Partners, labels the idea “a complete gimmick”, arguing it will never have any traction in Australia. He says the energy it would take to produce such a building would take too much to offset. “High rise environments you invariably needs to invest a lot of energy into. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
NH Architecture principal Roger Nelson says there has been a lot of recent innovation around food distribution and sustainable environments, but he argues such intensive buildings would be too much to offset. While he supports the “community mindedness” of the concept, he can’t see it taking off in Australia.
“It sounds like an idea that has come from a very dense city. Where the only way to create land is to build it. It’s a bit like car stacking,” he says.
But sustainability has been taken into account by vertical farms’ designer Professor Dickson Despommier, of Columbia University, New York. He told The Times the farms are a way of getting around the farmer’s number one enemy, the weather. He says one farm, rising up to 30 storeys, could provide enough food for 10,000 people.
