Category — China

Photo by Dezeen.

Landgrab City

By Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson, José Esparza
December 2009 – January 2010
2009 Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism

From the China-lab site:

Landgrab City is an installation commissioned by the Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism and located on Shenzhenwan Avenue (Nanshan), a busy shopping district in the city of Shenzhen. Conceived as an experimental investigation into the full extent of Shenzhen’s spatial footprint, the installation is comprised of two parts: an aerial photograph of one of the city’s densest areas, home to approximately 4.5m people, and a plot of cultivated land divided into small lots. This land is a representation, at the same scale as the city itself, of the amount of territory necessary to provide the food consumed by the inhabitants of the portion of city sampled in the map, projected to 2027 (the year China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s leading economy). Each lot represents the extent of a single food group’s footprint: vegetables, cereals, fruit, pasture (for livestock), and so on.

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2007 – Winner of the 2nd International Competition for Sustainable Housing by Knafo Klimor Architects and Town Planners, Israel

Excerpts from Living Steels’ competition design website.

Agro-housing, the winning design for construction in China, blends urban and rural living by creating vertical greenhouse space within high-rise apartments. Designed by Knafo Klimor Architects, the Agro-housing concept allows tenants to produce their own food, reducing commuting needs and providing a green neighbourhood.

Knafo Klimor Architects developed this concept with concern for predictions that 50% of China’s one billion people will live in its cities, a trend mirrored in many developing countries in the world. The architects observe that massive urbanisation displaces communities, dissipating existing traditions and heritage, as well as placing a strain on energy resources and infrastructure.

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An estimated 15 million urban white-collars spend more than five hours a day on Happy Farm, according to data from the game’s creator.

China’s growing addiction: online farming games

Elliott Ng
Venture Beat
October 29, 2009

A new agrarian revolution has occurred in China, but only in the virtual worlds of social games. Social farm games now dominate all major Chinese social networking sites — RenRen (formerly Xiaonei), Kaixin001, 51.com, and QQ’s QZone. The May launch and 2H 2009 adoption of QQ Farm — a version of China’s already popular Happy Farm game built to run on Tencent’s estimated 228 million active-user QZone platform — may very well have transformed China into the leading country of online farmers.

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Bangalore urban agriculture.

In this bulletin you will find information on:

1. RUAF From Seed to Table Programme

2. Other Urban Agriculture activities by the RUAF Partners

Food, Agriculture and Cities: challenges and way forward

Workshop on influencing and assisting national policy processes

Increasing recognition for urban agriculture in China

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Jin Meisheng
1959, February
The vegetables are green, the cucumbers plumb, the yield is abundant
Cailü guafei chanliang duo

Great Leap Forward (1956-1960)

In the three years of crop failures and famine following the Great Leap Forward, this poster with its abundant food is reprinted over and over again. The total number of copies runs to over a million.
From Chinese Posters Net.

The RUAF Foundation, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, International Development Research Centre, Urban Harvest (CGIAR), the Chinese Urban Agriculture Association and the Nanjing Agriculture and Forestry Bureau are organizing a networking event “Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture for Resilient Cities (Green, Productive and Socially Inclusive)” to take place on Wednesday, November 5th, 14.00-16.00 hours, in the Auditorium, at the World Urban Forum in Nanjing, China. There will also be a booth at the Exhibition and a tour to some urban and peri-urban agricultural sites.

See program flyer here.

“Farm plots amidst apartment blocks in Chaozhou. A beautiful addition to an otherwise drab urban scene.” Photo from Flickr by JesseWarren.

Chaozhou, literally “Tide Prefecture”; (usually spelled Chiu Chow in the US and Hong Kong), also widely known by its Postal map spelling Teochew, is a prefecture-level city in eastern Guangdong province, People’s Republic of China.

Link to larger photo.>