Future food: urban agriculture – Australia Broadcasting Corp.

Image by Bob Krist.

Empowerment of farming communities is completely a new concept

Presented by Antony Funnell
ABC
18 November 2010

All three of our guests were in Australia recently for a week-long series of design workshops, public talks and events, held at The Edge, in Brisbane. The event was called ‘Unlimited: Designing for the Asia-Pacific’.

Three perspectives on food, our urban environment and future tastes. Our guests:

CJ Lim, author Smart-cities and Eco-warriors.
Founder of Studio 8 Architects and Professor of Architecture and Cultural Design at the Bartlett, University College London.

Paul Bennett
Managing Partner (Europe) and Chief Creative Officer at IDEO.

Jeb Brugmann, author of Welcome to the Urban Revolution.
Urban strategist, author and thinker.
2009 Future Tense program on vertical farming

Excerpt from the transcript of the interview:

Antony Funnell: So in that sense, we’re talking about using rooftops, using the tops of car-parks, using, re-examining those areas as potential areas for supplying our cities with food.

Jeb Brugmann: Yes, verticality is one of the underlying natural resources that comes with building a city. To create an environment like say coral molluscs create an environment, or like trees create a forest ecosystem, and two dimensions, is really not tapping into the potential. When we build cities, what we do is create more land area upon which to live, by building up, or upon which to grow our food. And the vertical farms is more than just using the rooftops, but as you likely know, it’s really about creating production systems within a building where the protein production of fish, the waste of the fish is used to fertilise the crops. So you create a whole nutrient cycle within the building, then in a way it’s kind of a micro-ecosystem in its own right.

Antony Funnell: And isn’t that type of system, isn’t that going to determine what sort of products we can grow? If you’re looking at a vertical farm, to make it work economically within a community within a city, you’re going to have to make some decisions about what’s going to be planted, and what’s not going to be planted, what’s going to be grown, and what’s not going to be grown, aren’t you?

Jeb Brugmann: Yes, and this is a whole new territory in terms of the experimentation of understanding what species function together within a system. We’re doing nothing any different than what in nature in a way was kind of the trial and error of the laws of survival about how you can create a synergy between species, so they can coexist together and be managed together. But the key thing is on the demand side, we can also deal with the problem. In other words, I think that we’ll end up having to have regional cuisines that are based on what can be grown within the urban region. And you start to see this a little bit now, you know, the rise of specific local cuisines that people take pride in.

Now all we have to do is connect up the supply that we can grow within a region, with the taste of the regional cuisine. And it’s happening; I’m talking and writing about for instance, the region of Metro Vancouver that has a massive agricultural system. People in Vancouver spend about $5-billion a year on food. Of course a lot of that comes in from outside, it’s processed food, but it produces $10-billion worth of agricultural products a year within the metro area. The metro area agricultural lands count for about 1-1/2% of the whole province of British Columbia’s agricultural lands, but they produce 28% of the food production within the province of British Columbia. So we see here a metro area that is evolving and now has a regional food strategy, has a huge industry, employs one out of eight people within the metro area within the city in food production, which can increasingly be targeted to the consumers of the city itself.

See the complete interview here.