Category — Design

For the day-to-day needs of commercial urban farmers

Created by Cléa Lautrey
BDes. Industrial Design
Emily Carr University of Art + Design
Vancouver BC 2013

“MOBIEL is designed to support the day-to-day needs of commercial urban farmers in Vancouver. The local urban farming community is comprised of a flourishing demographic of friendly, passionate people who seek more efficiency than community gardeners, yet do not require a tractor to get from one end of their farm to another.

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Prices range from $139.00 to $149.00

The Food Map Container is a growing space for an an edible garden. The contoured form of the container base is specifically designed to let water drain quickly and evenly which keeps plants from being damaged by sitting water, but also has a central reservoir where a small amount of water collects keeping the soil moist longer-The Food Map Container has rubber casters so one could move the container easily to the best growing space as weather and sunlight conditions change.

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Urban farming jewelry by le FabShop.

FabJam event theme: ‘Urban Farming’

Projects such as:

Veggiecoaster:
Garden planted in a wagon which can be shared between neighbours via balconies / windows plants seeded in eco flower pots made from ironed plastic bags.

FabLab Farm:
Bee-hive-shaped automated window farming for fish, herbs, veggies.

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A hydroponic installation, which is conceptually derived from an interest in urban agriculture.

Hydroponic Bottle Wall

By Peter Gudonis, Carly Dean and Nicholas Cassab-Gheta
Architecture student at Cornell University

Wine rack? Light installation?  Element of urban agriculture? All of the above! This installation is a growing “wine rack” constructed using locally sourced and recycled materials, conceptually derived from the growing trend of urban agriculture and incorporating green spaces, green roofs, growing facades, hydroponics, aeroponics and other productive technologies in buildings. This Hydroponic Bottle Wall is only a microcosm of the growing trend of urban agriculture.

By infusing cities with agriculturally productive technology and spaces, design has the potential to improve the eminent urban food-crisis by alleviating reliance on fast-food, reducing food miles, reducing the prevalence of food deserts, and increasing access to affordable healthy, organic, and local produce.

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See complete image here.

Design Trust put together a metrics framework that measured the associated activities of urban agriculture with the known benefits derived from various studies.

By Kyle Rogler
Sustainable Cities Collective
March 27, 2013

Excerpt:

Transforming underutilized land into productive urban farms was one of the many topics which were presented at the recent Kansas City Design Week. Jerome Chou, past Director of Programs at the Design Trust for Public Space, presented his unique experience with the implementation of the Five Boroughs Farm in New York City and the impact that urban agriculture can have on low-income areas of a city.

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O’Hare’s Urban Garden. Photo by reallowvibe.

The airport has also been home to a handful of honeybees being tended to by urban beekeepers

By Rick Paulas
KCET
March 21, 2013

Excerpt:

The 928-square-foot garden, first opened last September, consists of 26 aeroponic towers that grow a variety of herbs and vegetables. The list of produce growing in the towers includes, but is not limited to, chard, basil, lettuce, edible flowers, bell peppers, and tomatoes. And just who is using these vegetables? Currently, three restaurants in the airport proper make regular treks to the garden to harvest produce for their dishes: Wolfgang Puck, Rick Bayless’s Tortas Fontera Grill, and the highly-acclaimed Wicker Park Sushi Bar.

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Interviews with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander, born in 1921

‘Oral histories with significant landscape architects’
The Cultural Landscape Foundation
Interviews with Cornelia Hahn Oberlander done in the summer of 2008

Recognized as a national treasure in Canada, Cornelia Hahn Oberlander has been creating innovative landscapes for more than sixty years.

A leader in the profession, her work with preeminent architects throughout Canada and the United States, has provided sustainable solutions for private gardens and public spaces alike.

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Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition Awards

By Federica Marra
Manna from our roof
Leiden University, The Netherlands

Abstract:

In response to urbanized spaces’ alienation from food production and its ecological, recreational and economic values, it is necessary to reconceptualise the cities from the key viewpoint of sustainability and to educate its citizens about a new ecology of food. The manna FromOurRoof project will engage young people across the OECD countries in an international network of activities combining education, communication and business: participants will actively take part in cultivation, preservation, cooking and sale of local food products. By the means of roof gardens, window farms and edible walls, the facilities they will be working in will be providing the urban community with fresh and local produce, while taking care of their own energy supply, water and waste.

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The Urban Farm Company Of Colorado builds the gardens

By Bryant Mason
Stapleton Denver
March 4, 2013

Excerpt:

My business, The Urban Farm Company of Colorado, will be installing high-yield, organic, vegetable gardens at the new Stapleton Visitor Center as an example of how vegetable production can be sewn beautifully into new landscaping. Think ripe heirloom tomatoes hanging five feet above the ground on a trellis. Many of Stapleton’s homebuilders will also be displaying small, raised-bed gardens at their model homes (so watch out for them). Additionally, I will be teaching gardening classes and visiting the gardens throughout the season. Plus, I will always be available to answer questions and help homeowners launch their own gardens.

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Asian Cairns, Sustainable Megaliths For Rural Urbanity – Shenzhen 2013, China

By Vincent Callebaut Architects

Six multifunctional farmscrapers

The six gardening towers engraved in a Golden Triangle pile up a mixed programmation superimposing farmingscrapers cultivated by their own inhabitants. Like our Dragonfly project in New York, the aim is to repatriate the countryside in the city and to reintegrate the food production modes into the consumption sites. The megalithic towers are based on cairns, artificial stone heap present on the mountains to mark out the hiker tracks. Clever exploits of the construction, these six towers pile up housing, offices, leisure spaces in the monolithic pebbles superimposed on each other along a vertical central boulevard.

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“The Allotment” By Dean Moran

Tablet Magazine
February, 2013

Exceprt:

At the most fundamental level, a hotel is a machine for generating privacy — shelter, comfort, and peace and quiet are its most basic aims. Turning this private experience into a social one has proved to be a difficult challenge for the world’s hoteliers. Maybe that’s why the winner of our Rethink Hotels contest seems to have looked to restaurateurs, rather than hoteliers, for inspiration.

The Allotment uses food, not sleep, to structure the guest experience. It’s made up of four distinct elements, the first being the Allotment Market, where local producers and retailers sell food grown and made in the area in and around New York City. It’s a magnet for food-minded visitors, as well as a source for the dishes prepared by the hotel’s restaurant.

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Sugar Hill Housing in Harlem will provide 124 units of affordable housing. It will finish construction in December.

A Role Model for New York City’s Affordable Housing

By Ronda Kaysen
Architectural Record
Feb 14, 2013

Excerpt:

An urban farm on the rooftop of a David Adjaye–designed affordable-housing project in Harlem will provide fresh produce and income for the building sometime after construction has been completed in December. An $80 million development in the historic New York City neighborhood, Sugar Hill Housing will offer 124 units of rental housing for low-income adults and families. Adjaye’s stepped-profile design, with a rose-embossed, textured precast-concrete facade, makes it the latest example in a trend to replace bland institutional architecture typical of affordable housing with creative and striking design.

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(Brilliant concept. Mike)

Corrugated iron and timber need not represent poverty and oppression.

By Stephen Lamb and Andrew Lord
Touching the Earth Lightly
Feb 2013

Excerpt:

To explain the concept, hold in your mind a cube. Like the shack, the cube has six sides. Human-hearted design looks to address the issues of fire, flooding, food security and insulation by exploring design opportunities for each of these six sides.

The first side of the cube is the floor. We raise the shack off the ground to respond to the issue of flooding. Communities around the world have been doing this for thousands of years. This is not a new concept.

The next two sides of the cube represent the sun-facing walls of the shack. On these two sides The Green Shack suggests they be wrapped with a fire-proof boarding, covered by a vertical thriving organic vegetable garden. This wall garden creates food for the household. This wall is drip irrigated using a low tech, slow-release gravity fed system via a pipe made of re-cycled car tires. Rain water is also captured off the roof and stored on site. The slow-drip nature of the irrigation system ensures that the wall is constantly wet.

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The Community Supported Agriculture model means that community residents would have access to fresh food grown right in their own “backyard.” Photo by Mark Cullen.

In Burlington, Vermont, more than 8 per cent the food consumed by residents is grown within the city limits.

By Mark Cullen
The Star
Feb 01 2013

Excerpt:

Indulge me for a moment and imagine a new residential development of quality homes surrounding an 18-hole, championship golf course. A well-designed community of semis, towns and fully detached homes are knit together by winding, well-treed streets. Every garage has a golf cart in it and every golf cart has two large garden trugs in the back.

Say what? OK, change that golf course to a farm. And not just any old farm, the latest “urban” farm, where half of the green space normally devoted to the golf course is a huge garden that produces food for the immediate community. Fresh greens and produce are sold to local green grocers and restaurants. People travel long distances to see this place. And local residents only travel a few blocks to pick up their groceries, fresh from the land.

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Apple Orchard by Consuelo Soto Murphy.

Consuelo Soto Murphy’s artwork stems from the fields she worked in and the time she spent with her family.

Excerpt from Gallery One Visual Arts Center:

Consuelo Soto Murphy was born and raised in the Yakima Valley along with her nine siblings. Her parents were migrant workers who came to Washington in the 1950’s from a small, poor, little town named Bajan in Coahuila Mexico. The older four children had to work day in and day out in the fields. When her mother became ill with a brain tumor in 1960, the last five children were able to go to school during the day and work only part-time after school. Murphy was one of the lucky ones able to get an education.

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Cultivated farmland with buildings underground

Punch Magazine
1990

An urban/rural landscape where people live underground so that buildings don’t block sunshine from reaching crops. An urban core where apartments are spaced some distance from each other, leaving lots of room for farming.

“So you see, dear, one ‘can’ be decorative ‘and’ useful.”

Punch Magazine
1940

Here the artist envisions chickens grazing just beyond a hedge fence, which surrounds an ‘edible’ French formal garden.

Simon Fraser University in Greater Vancouver seeks proposals to complete ‘Learning Garden’ design work

RFP For The Design Of Sustainable SFU’s Learning Garden On Burnaby Mountain
The submission deadline is January 8, 2013.

SSFU’s Local Food Program currently operates a Community Garden, a Harvest Box food delivery program, and supports a pocket farmers’ market on campus. In 2013, we’re excited to add a garden space dedicated to research and learning in the (artichoke) heart of SFU’s Burnaby Mountain campus. This garden will increase the availability of campus-grown food, offer community space and programming at SFU Burnaby, be an experiential learning resource for faculty and students, and develop the skills and experience of SFU students.

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Moop is priced with one run ($600) or two runs ($800)

By Preston
Jetson Green
Dec. 6, 2012

Excerpt:

If you want something more in a chicken coop, we know of a few stylish options. Like Moop, for example, the Modern Coop for Design-Minded Chickens. This is designed by prefab and architecture firm Nottoscale and includes four cantilevered nesting boxes, hinged side-panel walls for easy access, a redwood screen for ventilation, a removable tray for easy cleaning, predator-proof latches, extra-strength chicken wire, and custom watering accessories.

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The golden-eyed lacewing (Chrysopa oculata), the paper wasp (Polistes fuscatus) and margined leatherwing (Chauliognathus marginatus).

The bugs are back — it’s a philatelic infestation! This fall, Canada Post has issued a special souvenir sheet with selected Beneficial Insects low value definitives.

Oct. 16, 2012

Issued in honour of the 125th anniversary of the Royal Philatelic Society of Canada, the souvenir sheet is aimed at young, beginning collectors. “The Society has always been committed to passing on knowledge about stamp collecting to subsequent generations, which is no doubt a factor in its longevity,” says Canada Post’s Director of Stamp Services Jim Phillips. “You could say we’re helping the Society pass on the collecting bug.”

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