Tuesday, August 31, 2010

11 Vertical Farms to Transform Our Cities

Urban agriculture advocates fight for clean, green food production in "farmscrapers," building on the success of living walls and mobile gardens.

The Sundance-winning documentary Fuel ends with a hopeful artist's rendering of the city of the near future, a clean, green metropolis that produces its own power by the wind and sun, and feeds itself from transparent skyscrapers that are planted up and down with hydroponic vegetables

Such vertical farms have captivated designers and gained wide traction on the Internet (here's one new innovative concept). They may seem the stuff of science fiction, but one of the pioneers of the concept, Dickson Despommier of Columbia University, told The Daily Green that we can expect to see the first built vertical farm "within a year." (One may even soon arrive in Las Vegas.)

"It allows cities to become small ecosystems with primary productivity at its base," Despommier told TDG. "It closes all the loops that opened-ended agriculture leaves open. 

There's no runoff, and there's continuous production year round," he added.

VF Type O by Oliver Foster

To see the other 10 vertical farms, click here.

Article by Brian Clark Howard Courtesy of TheDailyGreen



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