Manhattan envisages skyscraper farms

The BBC reports that scientists at Columbia University have devised a plan for interior skyscraper farms for New Yorkers.

Columbia University Professor Dickson Despommier and his students took existing greenhouse technology as a starting point and are now convinced that vertical farms within city skyscrapers are a practical suggestion.

In their design, energy is generated from a giant solar panel, with incinerators which use the farm’s waste products for fuel. All the water in the entire system is recycled, and the plan’s whole complex sustainable.

This project parallels the fresh foods from urban wastes pilot project currently being undertaken by Central Queensland University, led by Professor David Midmore.
Columbia University’s Professor Despommier told the BBC that advantages of this CBD agriculture include year-round crop production in a controlled environment; minimal exposure to pests (and therefore organic produce); elimination of dangerous agricultural runoff into river systems; and zero food miles, as produce would be conusmed locally.

This is a practical way to address climate change, the report says. The BBC’s Jeremy Cooke reports of a design that incorporates:

a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect. There would be a sophisticated irrigation system.

Even if it’s not quite natural…you’re going to get back the rest of the earth Professor Dickson Despommier

And so crops of all kinds and small livestock could all be grown in a controlled environment in the most urban of settings.

That means there would be no shipping costs, and no pollution caused by moving produce around the country.

The report says these types of city farms would free up cleared farmland to be reforested.

New group tackles Australia’s forgotten façade

One of the interesting consequences of Google Earth satellite viewing has been bird’s-eye critiques of architecture. Google Earth, reports the Los Angeles Times, has enabled people to look at cities with ”a new kind of architectural tourism… What’s changing most radically, in other words, is not how buildings look but how we look at buildings.”

From the crow’s-eye view a tangle of urban problems are apparent: a paucity of aesthetic considerations, poorly-planned physical infrastructure, density, congestion, wasted spaces. Most urban issues are invisible: water and waste management, effects of climate change, energy conservation, air quality, and loss of native habitat. Not so in many European and north American cities, where architects, town planners and landscapers are using very visible, simple and profitable solutions to all these problems in what is known as the “fifth façade” and the “forgotten façade”: the rooftop.

These issues were all discussed at the recent Green Roofs for Healthy Australian Cities (GRHAC) conference in Brisbane, where attendees considered ways to merge the ‘black arts’ (engineering) with the ‘green arts’ (landscaping). Another consideration is, of course, the ‘muddy-grey arts’: bureacracy. Luckily, foundation members of GRHAC include urban planners, landscape architects, horticulture experts and engineers. Pictured above is the new committee.

• Back row: Raylene Mibus (Vic, landscape design, horticulture), Sidonie Carpenter (Qld, landscape architect), Josh Kidd (Qld, engineer), Robyn Shaw (NT, landscape architect). Front row: Ben Nicholson (Vic, urban planner), Paul Downton (SA, architect), Geoff Wilson (Qld, founder & president).

Crosss-posted at greenroofs.wordpress.com

A roofing answer to climate change

See Geoff Wilson’s article in Online Opinion.

Fresh roof-food from urban wastes

Queensland’s future green roof businesses can expect to produce healthy fresh food from recycled organic wastes.