Solutions from Above: Using Rooftop Agriculture to Move Cities Towards Sustainability
Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn. Photo by Liu Xin.
Rooftop agriculture (RA) is the production of fresh vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers on rooftops for local consumption.
By Aaron Quesnel, Joshua Foss, Nina Danielsson
School of Engineering Blekinge Institute of Technology Karlskrona, Sweden 2011
125 pages
Abstract:
Cities present many opportunities to improve socio-ecological sustainability through efficiencies of scale and access to resources and services. These benefits are often compromised by rapidly increasing urban populations demanding energy, water, resources and food that are sourced, produced and transported from rural areas in unsustainable ways. A systems level approach to understanding the complex challenges cities face is required to strategically plan for the future. Rooftop agriculture is one measure that can help address many sustainability problems cities are currently faced with.
Our research aims to identify the role rooftop agriculture can play in moving society towards sustainability, the challenges it currently faces that may prevent it from being widely implemented, and how to overcome these challenges. To structure our research, we used the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD), a scientifically rigorous and peer reviewed model designed to manage the complexity of planning and decision-making towards sustainability. The culmination of this paper was the creation of a Sustainable Rooftop Agriculture Guide, a practical resource that can help city stakeholders determine how to best use rooftop agriculture in their movement towards sustainability.
5 Conclusion
This study used the Framework for Strategic Sustainable Development (FSSD) to understand the relationship between rooftop agriculture and a successful city/food nexus. The research determined that while currently in a nascent stage, rooftop agriculture has the potential to be a strategic action to move a city of the developed world towards sustainability.
Our findings determined the importance of RA being approached from a strategic sustainability perspective to fully value its potential. While RA can contribute key benefits to the city/food nexus in isolation, its strengths lie in its ability to address environmental, social and economic sustainability problems simultaneously. The FSSD played a critical role for this research, and acted as the backbone for collecting and interpreting our results.
RA has shown to be a strategic method in bridging the gap between the current city/food nexus and an ideal one when viewed from a systems perspective. A lack of information and subsequent awareness of RA amongst the general public and policy makers reoccurred as the most significant challenges which the industry currently faces. To accelerate innovation within the field, government policies, incentives and industry guidelines supporting RA development should be created. RA as an industry will also benefit from future collaboration and coordination between RA practitioners, green roof technologists and urban agriculture stakeholders to effectively share and make use of research findings and best practices.
We hope that this research will help shed light onto the environmental, social and economic benefits that can be achieved by using creativity and innovation to explore new ways of using existing spaces within the built environment. RA is just one of countless ways which society can redesign the spaces in which we live work and play in an effort to become more healthy, happy and sustainable.
3 comments
Hey Michael, thank you for the quick post of our paper! It was a fun exploration and your contributions were very much appreciated!
I’d really like to encourage everyone to check out our Guide that we created to supplement the paper… it has all the pertinent info from the paper, with additional elements like case studies, project definition & site selection guidelines, implementation challenges and plant recommendations (and it’s much more stylish!) Take a look here:
http://metrohippie.com/sustainable-rooftop-agriculture-guide/
Most figures around the world have almost 2 hectares of land needed to sustain a person for a complete year’s supply of food. In a modestly dense city this is some 10 times its footprint. Even if the entire city was a garden, the food demands would still outstrip its footprint by a factor of nine. While it may be nice to have green fingers, and home grown produce, is it a bit naive to promote this concept RA as ‘sustainable’? Or are the international estimates wrong? And what is the cost of city wide conversion?
Hey Gordon, a very valid point you bring up here… we were using the term ‘sustainable’ in context of two different variables… the first is in rooftop agriculture systems alone, how they can be constructed and managed in sustainable ways… the second is in a larger city/food context in which sustainable cities of the future will do a much better job of utilizing roofspaces in beneficial ways, be it energy production, rainwater harvesting, or food cultivation. The benefits of localizing our food supply (and using rooftops as one such mean to do so) are abundant, and I encourage you to check out our guide for a quick overview…
We understand that RA will not necessarily be a primary source for a region’s food production… It’s true that individuals require around 2 hectares of land, but urban agriculture methods utilizing controlled environments (like a hydroponic greenhouse) have been shown to be up to 13 times more productive per scale than traditional agriculture techniques.
And as far as costs are concerned… we were hoping to dig into the business case for RA but ran short of time or resources for our research… there are so many moving parts right now that complicate the economics… We think it’s important to let a couple key projects that have been developed operate for several years to help establish a bottom line… but from some of the systems we studied, the ROI is extremely compelling, which is exciting.
thanks for the dialogue!
-josh
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