Executive summary:
A large part of the less privileged world population does not easily have access to fresh and healthy fruits and vegetables. While rural areas are less and less populated and cities are developing to overflow, food security becomes a global concern. In response to this situation, peri -urban and urban agriculture is evolving. Thanks to integrated biosystems that cascade nutrients and energy in the cascade, we can remedy soils deemed unfit for agriculture. Urban agriculture creates value from unused spaces, such as flat roofs, but can also be incorporated into urban development, to transform the interior of buildings. In doing so, not only do we grow food, but we also increase the real estate value of the building by generating additional income, reducing costs and increasing the flow of people in these facilities. In addition, plants can be used in sewer systems in the treatment of wastewater, in order to recycle "waste" in nutrients. This agricultural system offers new objectives in terms of resource efficiency and contributes to the attenuation of climate change.
Keywords: urban agriculture, peri -urban agriculture, integrated biosystems, greenhouses, practical sustainability, fair waste, five nature kingdoms, climate change.
Integrated biosystems and agriculture:
My meeting with Professor George Chan in Beijing in 1994 radically changed my vision of agriculture. This Mauritian health engineer, a graduate of the Imperial College of London, worked for two decades for the American Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the Pacific Islands under American control. At the age of 59, he decided to take an early retirement and return to the land of his ancestors in Guangzhou (China). He intends to restore the house of his grandparents and create a library there containing all of his work, while learning the traditional methods of Chinese agriculture. He witnessed the emerging urbanization of China and observed how traditional techniques are integrated into new rapidly growing cities. George has become my grand master in agriculture, in particular urban agriculture. Initially, he called it "integrated agricultural systems", but over the years, we started calling it "integrated biosystems" (IBS), because we wanted to go beyond the idea that we were simply farmers. The following year (1995), I met Bill Mollison, the founder of Permaculture. It was interesting to learn that George Chan and Bill Mollison had worked together in Australia and realized that they had a lot in common, but had decided to follow different paths. Permaculture was originally inspired by the Rockers' gardens of the Amerindians of New Mexico and followed the logic of the first organic discoveries by combining plants, animals and minerals. The results are impressive and permaculture has become a global trend for efficient agriculture on a small scale using available resources. If I have never worked directly with Bill Mollison, we have however worked a lot with Jerome Ostenkowski1, one of the founders of permaculture in the United States, which has extended the permacultural farm of Basalt, in Colorado, y Adding mushrooms and algae. He demonstrated for the first time how peri -urban agriculture at an altitude of 2,000 meters in rocky soil could produce food all year round. However, our interest in improving performance by using the available resources was inspired by the extraordinary work of George Chan. George created productive food and energy units, exploited with plants, animals, bacteria and algae, on plots where nothing would grow. According to George, those who think that the soil is poor do not understand nature. It is firmly convinced that each type of soil can be improved spectacularly, provided you design an integrated agricultural technique where the digester and the organic waste cycle occupies a central place. Professor Li Kangmin, from the Asia-Pacific Regional Center for Research and Training for Integrated Pisculture (IFFC), based in Wuxi (China), has enriched George's IBS from his point of view of the way of raising the Fish, by effectively circulating nutrients and energy. They have great mutual respect for each other. I was so impressed by the practical approach to George and Professor Li that I financed the creation of a biosystem integrated into the Montfort Boys Town, on the outskirts of Suva, the capital of Fiji. After a visit, organized by He Robin Yarrow, the Ambassador of Fiji to Japan based in Tokyo, I decided that this vocational training school was an ideal platform to demonstrate the logic put forward by George. He was happy to direct the IBS project, integrating the five kingdoms from start to finish. He moved to Fiji for 9 months to supervise the initiative and build the facilities. As soon as the program is launched, the UNDP (Pacific Office), Hiroyuki Fujimura, CEO of Ebara Corporation (Japan), and Kazuhiko Nishi, President of ASCII (Japan) provided wider support and additional funds. George had the intuition that if we integrated the 5 kingdoms of nature throughout agriculture, as classified by Dr. Lynn Margulis, co-author of Gaia theory with James Lovelock, the level of production of Food and energy would be greater than even the most chemical and genetically advanced programs could reach. This hypothesis had to be tested. Professor Motoyuki Suzuki, of the Institute of Industrial Sciences (IIS) of the University of Tokyo, went there and demonstrated, with a team of doctoral students, that the culture method was neutral carbon. Mr. Nishi, the Japanese entrepreneur, sent scientific equipment to Fiji to undertake the food and energy cycle in order to demonstrate the carbon neutrality of research.
Biosystems integrated into action:
George designed the complete system, starting with a pigsty. He carefully divided the hectare into two porchies of 60 pigs each. He has mastered every detail, to the point of teaching pigs to defecate in certain areas, to maintain the enclosures in cleanliness which exceeds the understanding of farmers and to simplify the maintenance. Pigs were mainly fed by worn substrates from the cultivation of mushrooms, which were mainly brasserie drêches from the local beer producer, located a few kilometers from the Montfort school. The pork slurry was transported to a three -bedroom digester that produced the biogas used to sterilize the fungus substrate. The digester's mud was mineralized in algae basins, and algae were used as a food additive for pigs. The water flowed from algae basins to the fish pond, stimulating the growth of zooplankton and phytoplankton. Quality topsoil was used to create dikes, which were covered with grass which was cut daily and thrown into the fish pond, which made it possible to build a pond three meters deep by increasing the dikes one meter only.
The rich water of the pond contained fish living at seven different trophic levels and was used to irrigate the clay soil, originally classified as unfit for agriculture. Thanks to the water from the pond, we obtained at least two harvests per year, defying the logic of fertility. George concludes with a smile: “We raise fish without feeding them. We feed fish feeding! I went to Fiji five times, and I saw the project take place. George and his team created courses at the University of the South Pacific and we attended the production of animal proteins, the harvest of plants rich in starch and carbon hydrates and abundant betacarotene algae. The excess of nutrients in the ponds was eliminated by floating rice gardens. There was nothing more rewarding than drinking the first rice pot. In 1997, I drank tea infused with biogas from the digester with Mr. Ratu Kamisse Mara, the president of Fiji.
The case of Fiji allowed me to see how the IBS evolves from the idea to reality and how it can be implemented in a peri -urban environment. Hundreds of young boys have learned to make the farm operate and left with the technical knowledge necessary to recreate it on their islands. George appreciated the experience and when the opportunity arose to implement the same concept in Tsumeb, Namibia, we quickly deployed the know-how in Africa. After meeting all expectations in the hot and humid islands of the South Pacific, George began to work on the spot in Namibia for 9 months in a desert environment. It was a challenge, especially the cold and windy winter nights. But George was determined to complete the construction of a sorghum brewery from Namibian Breweries with an IBS including a mushroom farm on sorghum waste (the raw material of beer), a pigsty, a digester, a seaweed basin and seaweed and A fish basin. Mr. Werner List, President of the Ohlthaver & List group, with the support of his vice-president, Udo Stitter, and Bernd Masche, the CEO of Namibian Breweries, brought their full cooperation and co-financed 50 % of the program, the Zeri Foundation covering the other half. Mr. Sam Nujoma, president of Namibia, even came to drink a cup of tea as a sign of sustainability that was not only theoretical, but practical. When, years later, the brasserie closed its doors due to a lack of demand for industrial sorghum beer, the fungus has continued to operate with elephant grass and residue of the local orchard as a substrate. The two heads of state of Fiji and Namibia participated in the 3rd world congress on zero programs held in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1997. They delivered a striking testimony of the way in which the IBS had Changed their perception of food security and climate change. The IBS in Fiji worked exceptionally until a coup forced He Ratu Kamisse Mara, known as the founding father of Fiji and who had strongly supported the project, to leave his post. The school had to close its doors. Brother Thomas who managed the establishment had to face so many challenges that operations suffered a lot and that the equipment remained maintenance without a year and a half. We have a documentary film from Australia and a major photographic report by Luis Camargo which visited the Fiji only a few months before the political upheaval causes discontinuity. The Montfort Boys Town project was one of the seven strengths of the Universal 2000 exhibition in Hanover, Germany, and two of the students spent five months at the exhibition to explain to the public what they had learned.
The published version of the acts of the regional scientific meeting on Fiji, funded by the UNDP in 1998, organized by the University of the South Pacific and documented by the United Nations University and the University of Namibia. In 1998, Professor Keto Mshigeni, pro-vice-keen at the University of Namibia2, succeeded Professor Carl-Göran Hedén within the Scientific Council of Zeri, and therefore participated in the documentation process. He had documented the IBS of the Tunweni brasserie of the Ohlthaver & List group in the mining city of Tsumeb, right next to the Etosha Pan in Namibia, in another series of acts supported by UNESCO. This documentation and the experience of the Songhai Center in Benin (case 101) made it possible to understand first -hand how peri -urban agriculture could work and set new standards for agriculture. The main conclusion is that the approach of George and Professor Li not only made it possible to obtain the best yields, but also to identify the best incomes for farmers and to overcome synthetic products, since the combination of Five "waste food" kingdoms is fueled by the abundance of sun and water. 3 The results were not only embarrassing for the followers of genetic modification, they have shown that agricultural communities are essential to ensure the subsistence of the poor and the quality of food from the entire population.
Farming for a city:
It is necessary to move from peri -urban agriculture to urban agriculture, by designing food and energy systems for areas with high population density. To fully understand the potential, I organized field visits to China, the United States, Brazil and Cuba. The visit of the Qingyuan (清远) in the province of Guangdong (广东;), organized by Professor Shu-Ting Chan, then dean of the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the Chinese University of Istanbul, was a success.
Shu-Ting Chan, then dean of the Faculty of Biological Sciences of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, was a revelation: a city of the same area that San Francisco employed 250,000 people in the culture of mushrooms in urban areas. We consider the cultivation of fungi as one of the largest potential applications in urban agriculture. The thousands of initiatives that we have observed and inspired in the field of mushroom culture offer us a first -hand perspective on how to feed 75 % of the citizens of the world piled up over a few square meters in slums. This article will not fall into the details of the cultivation of mushrooms, which is the subject of another case study, but it is important to emphasize that the Zeri teams and the practitioners of the blue economy around the world have Designed from food security programs in villages, cities and mega -cities, each time starting from a simple mushroom cultivation unit which transforms fibrous waste easily available in food and animal food. It is the same logic of the five reigns of nature that inspired us to consider plants as food (coffee grounds) for mushrooms, then to use the worn substrates enriched with amino acids as animal food and finally Collect manure for composting, thus using four of the five kingdoms of nature in a local system.
The second excursion took place in Wuxi (无锡) in the province of Jiangsu (江苏省). Our host was the teacher.
Li Kangmin who had participated in the Zeri world congress in Namibia, where he visited the site of the beer brewery, and in Colombia, where he saw the culture of mushrooms in urban areas in the city of Manizales . I returned four times to Wuxi: first for the interesting agricultural techniques in the city center, then for IFFC and finally because my first fables in Chinese were published in cooperation with the Wuxi association for the promotion of science and technology. This region in the process of rapid industrialization, whose GDP exceeds one thousand billions of dollars, half of that of California and 50 % of that of India, has retained its agricultural component in the local economy. This can be explained by a historical reason: the population of Wuxi was saved from hunger in the early sixties thanks to the city's culture of spinach of water, azola, chlorella and its technique of fish farming integrated, which are centuries -old traditions and are part of water management. While this approach to food security is only viable in cities where water is abundant, it has been stressed that each large city, even when there is a shortage (perceived) of water, has an excess wastewater. This water is considered to be polluted by some and excessively rich in nutrients by others, but remains unused for productive purposes by most.
Professor Li showed me how the biological waste system of the city of Wuxi could create a large food production system. He never followed a biologist training, but as a subordinate military officer, he was concerned with the livelihoods of the inhabitants of Wuxi and launched the culture of water spinach when the needs were high. Without biological waste rich in nutrients, spinach would not grow. When spinach grows, their roots provide exceptional food to carp that feed on grass. The more the carp nibble on the roots in suspension, the more the spinach grows. Professor Li saw this symbiosis develop. She went in the direction of Professor Professor George Chan. According to him, a high -oxygen (DBO) biological demand is not a problem, it implies a high concentration of nutrients and therefore the need to design an intensive elimination of these nutrients through plants (floating gardens), Algae (Azolla and Chlorella) and fish (at each trophic level).
Agriculture and wastewater:
The third excursion led us to the United States. If the country does not exceed in terms of sustainability, many scientists and entrepreneurs have addressed new and inspiring techniques to combine water treatment, food production and energy needs. It was Canadian scientist John Todd and his wife Nancy who opened my eyes to the possibility of using greenhouses to treat wastewater and convert the abundant nutrients to food for plants and fish. Richard Perl, a social activist and entrepreneur based in New York who has supported many of my initiatives for decades, took me to South Burlington, Vermont (United States), to see John's pioneer work in 1999. The city of South Burlington was a well -known region of me. It is close to the headquarters of Ben & Jerry, the ice manufacturer socially engaged. I had visited Ben Cohen, one of the co -founders, in 1993 and traveled the region to discover the impact of social leadership as demonstrated by Ben & Jerry. In order to have an operational wastewater treatment system all year round in a region characterized by hard and cold winters, John proposed and installed the installation in a greenhouse. John located the first municipal facilities of this type on the outskirts of the city. I had learned that plants enter a winter sleep during the biological treatment of waste in my detergents factory in Belgium, while they operated on reed beds. I had thought of using the exothermic reaction of the soap to control the temperature of the air of a large greenhouse, but my team had judged the prohibitive cost. I did not yet know that John Todd could generate the additional income necessary to finance this additional investment.
John Todd's wastewater treatment system in South Burlington has converted 10 % of city wastewater into a nutrient and clean water supply. Its success aroused the interest of many investors and one of them made a financial offer that John could not refuse. Unfortunately, the pure interest in money and profit led to a break with the social and ecological inspiration of John Todd: he shared his know-how with students from around the world, to then upset the investor who used Brands and intellectual property (PI) as the basis of its income model. It took more than a decade to John Todd to find his name and his notoriety. Despite the tests he has gone through, his ecological design company has continued to develop. Meanwhile, he was appointed professor emeritus of natural resources at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources of the University of Vermont. Unfortunately, John Todd is not the only one to fight to maintain a balance between free access to know-how and the preservation of original intellectual property.
Urban agriculture and self -sufficiency:
The fourth visit to the field to study urban agriculture brought me to Brasilia, the capital of Brazil. Mr. Cassio Taniguchi, former mayor of Curitiba and Minister of Planning of Brasilia, showed me how urban planners of the sixties had attributed land around the newly created city to immigrant farmers, mainly from Japan. These agricultural lands, associated with an abundant supply of water, today ensure 90 % self -sufficiency in fruits and vegetables for the two million inhabitants of the city. Food is inexpensive in Brasilia, not due to the efficiency of large -scale agriculture in the roughly mato or cheap imports in Chile, but thanks to the ingenuity of the founding fathers of the new capital, which included food and water safety. The only other city in the world which reaches this level of food security inside its limits is Habana (Cuba), our fifth study on the ground. This situation is not the result of chance, but of necessity. Cuban citizens, determined and creative, were, due to the boycott of the United States and the disappearance of the Soviet Union, deprived of fertilizers and food. This imposed a new start in agriculture. The results are just as impressive: not only was the city to ensure food security, but the diet of the population has changed for the best, as the health indices show. The limited availability of dairy and meat products has prompted the population to adopt a healthy diet, which has resulted in a significant drop in heart disease and diabetes.
The experiences of these different continents and the expert opinions provided by the network of scientists from Zeri have encouraged us to take up the challenge of urban agriculture. Our young research team, in UNEP offices in Geneva, has documented many other cases by documentary research. At the beginning of the third millennium, we knew that every corner of a city, whether it was a balcony, a roof, a kitchen or a bathroom, could become a green oasis. We considered the creation of the "plant city" because the design team of the Politecnico Di Torino, under the direction of Professor Luigi Bistagnino, demonstrated that it was an opportunity to make cities self -sufficient in food and neutral carbon, attenuating the risks linked to climate change, benefiting from full employment and healthier living conditions.
The innovations of agriculture in the city:
Tina Schmidt, of the German Entrepreneurship Institute, then colleague from Professor Günter Falli who teaches entrepreneurship at the Libre University in Berlin, taught students how to use the humidity of kitchens and bathrooms to cultivate Mushrooms. The course was repeated and supported by other scientific data at the Technical University of Hamburg-Haarburg, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Ralf Otterpohl, Director of the Institute for the Protection of Wastewater and Waters4, which has launched courses on the integrated use of water. Professor Otterpohl had organized the first courses at the Zeri pavilion of the Hanover Universal Exhibition in the fall of 2000, and became one of the founders of Zeri in Germany. Over the next two years, more than 200 students have put experiences into practice, including the cultivation of mushrooms in the city center. The smallest productive vegetable gardens are only 1.20m x 1.20m. As the balconies are calculated to support 300 kg/m2, you can place a lot in a small space well exposed to the sun and the rain. All unsuccessful biomass will end in an effective composting cycle. Food would be produced using herbs, vegetables and fast -rotating flowers, thus guaranteeing the availability of food, its practicality and embellishment of the house. By working with students, we realized that there is an additional reason to cultivate in dormitories, houses and all possible corners: this reduces costs and therefore increases purchasing power, while offering free healthy foods, usually too expensive for limited budgets.
The power of urban agriculture is not only in food, but also in money. Everything that is produced and consumed locally requires a fraction of packaging, which improves the efficiency of resources. This brings us to the impact of urban agriculture on climate change. A recent evaluation of urban and peri -urban agriculture in nine cities in Africa and Asia5 has shown how the third world can contribute to the attenuation of climate change if food is produced locally. The potential contribution of industrialized countries and mega -cities is even more extreme: food is part of a supply chain which includes trucks in traffic jams, refrigerated distribution centers with energy -consuming chemical controls for parasites and mold that are a danger to health. For a long time, the Zeri network has found few creative approaches in the northern hemisphere. The most inspiring initiatives were in the developing world.
Urban agriculture in the first world:
There are of course exceptions. For example, there are some initiatives concerning fish farming, which started in the 1960s in the Mississippi Delta (United States) in the 1960s. Initially, food was made up of organic waste, but as farmers sought greater productivity and faster yield, food moved to GMO soy and slaughterhouse waste, unfortunately imported and thus draining the revenues of the local economy. A Berlin team offers to raise fish fish on roofs with foods imported from the Netherlands. It is easy to understand how expensive this process can be. The only ones to earn money are equipment sellers and fish suppliers for fish. The Zeri network is not content to replace a “entry-output” model with another, but goes beyond the simplicity of the “food entrance-meat outlet” model. We implement the nutrient and energy waterfall and use the existing infrastructures for new ends, as did Jan Willem Bosman Jansen by transforming the old greenhouses of flowers of the city of Egmont (Netherlands ) into fungi cultivation units, or Siemen Cox and Marc Slegers, who transformed an old swimming pool (Tropicana) in Rotterdam into a training center and cultivation of mushrooms.
The experiences of greenhouses in the United States in the Netherlands are interesting for urban agriculture in a temperate climate. Encouraging, former mayor Michael Bloomberg has greatly encouraged urban agriculture because it makes it possible to capture rainwater and divert them from the sewers, and to reduce the number of trucks on the roads, which decreases the gases greenhouse. Today, New York is the leader in urban agriculture in the United States, which, in America, does not necessarily mean that there is a huge volume, but that capital flows into commercial enterprises. To name just a few: Gotham Greens (Gothamgreens.com) was founded in 2008 by Vijay Puri and Eric Haley; Brooklyn Grange (Brooklyngrangefarm.com) was created by Ben Flanner, Anastasia Cole Plakias and Gwen Schantz; Bright Farms (Brightfarms.com), created by Ted Caplow and led by Paul Lightfoot, the CEO which raised 20 million capital and provides the main supermarkets for an annual value of $ 130 million in food sales. The city of New York goes up a gear and has decided to launch a farm on the roofs of 20,000 square meters on its food distribution center in the Bronx.
Urban agriculture and real estate value:
Although I appreciated all the initiatives, that I have visited them to understand commercial logic, in particular the ability to collect funds and the power to communicate a need for change with websites with exceptional design, it is not that after having seen the LUFA farms in Montreal (Canada) that I had a clear image of the emerging business model: an increase in the value of real estate. Mohamed Huge, the founder and the driving force of the concept of Lufa farms, returned to his childhood dreams in the suburbs of Beirut, where all the houses had a farm, to note that the most logical place to make the 'Agriculture is a roof. The strength of Mohamed's proposal brought together a diversified team: an internet entrepreneur who immigrated to Canada, Yahya Badran, a Romanian immigrant holding a construction engineering diploma and Lauren Rathmell, a graduate Canadian student wishing to 'Apply studies on plants. The creation of this team was probably the most important factor in successful LUFA farms. They even managed to have the city's construction codes changed to facilitate urban agriculture, as did New York.
The main lesson was not only the logic of the greenhouse and the selection of fruits and vegetables; It was the relevance of financial advantages beyond the sale of products, what we call in the blue economy "multiple advantages, including multiple cash flows". The construction of a greenhouse represents an additional cost for the farmer, but is a significant energy saving for the occupants in winter and in summer. Likewise, buildings that are energy -efficient have a higher value on the market and buildings (especially shopping centers) which are unique attract more visitors, which generates additional income. An additional income for the occupants of a project results in a higher value. This allows partnerships between people who have - at first glance - little in common, but who can design a very competitive urban agriculture model together. A member of our research network pointed out that urban farms on roofs have a size competitor in solar facilities on the roofs. I am delighted, but is it really competition? We consider that urban agriculture and the production of electricity on roofs are additional initiatives. Given the unused area of roofs, which amounts to millions of square meters, it will take decades before we knew a shortage! The increase in the value of real estate is directly linked to energy savings and the improvement of the resulting cash flows and which can be added to the economic model of urban agriculture. It is a well -established logic in real estate, but certainly not in the world of urban agriculture. On the other hand, urban agriculture is professionalizing its concepts and, thanks to the half-dozen investments that have materialized in the United States, the financial models are well understood. Now that there are hundreds of urban farms on roofs of more than a thousand square meters in the world, we are witnesses to several pioneering initiatives such as micro-algae cultivation on the roofs of Bangkok (Thailand) by Saumil Shah Energaia start-up (Energaia.com). The production of spirulina is fast, doubling every 24 hours, capturing CO2 and attenuating the climate by providing high quality nutrition.
Urban agriculture and design:
The most visionary comes from Japan, where the Pasona group (株式会社パソナ 株式会社パソナ)
has created an emblematic office construction with urban agriculture inside the building. By standing inside the building, I feel this construction in the same way as when I built the first green factory in the world, based in trunk (Belgium). The Pasona group is a personnel recruitment company that has offices worldwide. Its headquarters in the center of Tokyo, Ohtemachi, was first designed as the restoration of an old office building. The dialogues between Yoshimi Kono, the designer, Kenji Furushiro, the president of Pasona and Yasuyuki Nambu, the CEO, resulted in a most refreshing approach. The management team of Pasona had adopted as a corporate slogan "solutions to the problems of the company". Everyone agreed to say that the best way to show that the company was serious in its desire to train people capable of taking up the main challenges with which the company is confronted, was to build a head office that embodies what 'It represents. When I visited Pasona for the first time, I felt like I was in 1992, during the inauguration of the wooden factory with a budding roof. In the middle of Tokyo, the 20,000 square meter office building devotes 4,000 meters to green spaces, housing more than 200 species of plants, fruits, vegetables and rice. It is the largest "farm at the table" office in the city center of a city in the world: all that is produced is consumed in the canteen. This type of working environment changes the way people think: if your office is off the beaten track, you will think off the beaten track.
Pasona does not only want to promote urban agriculture, she wants to create new urban farmers. They want to arouse interest in a modern lifestyle, with a different office environment, while ensuring that the active lifestyle of their professionals is supplemented by educational programs on agricultural practices in Japan, adapted to a urban environment. Inside the office, tomato vines are suspended above conference tables; Lemon trees and passion fruit trees separate meeting spaces; Salads grow in seminar rooms and beans germinate under the benches. The design is not determined by ecological construction standards, energy saving practices or the desire for quality interior air. This is a place where people can think about daily tasks, their personal career choices and the way that everyone can follow to the future.
Agriculture in the cities of the future:
What Pasona does corresponds to the very essence of the blue economy: change the paradigm. The urban agriculture program offers a solution to certain social problems. It is unique to find business seats that have introduced urban agriculture, and exceptional to transform staff. Here, the case clearly shows that new business models cannot be fully captured in a classic business plan. We are convinced that urban agriculture will drop from more than 1,000 large -scale initiatives worldwide to at least 10,000 initiatives in a decade.
Cities will modify construction codes and investors will seek economies of scale in urban agriculture, the size of which is limited by the irregular space available on roofs, in particular on commercial and industrial buildings. For each thousand square meters of urban farms, there is a potential for creating 12 direct and indirect jobs, reducing the kilometers traveled by people to go to work as well as by food. This implies that 12,000 jobs have already been generated but that we see a potential of at least 25 million jobs in urban agriculture in a decade worldwide. The projects with which we have worked and from which we learned teachings have mobilized investments of the order of 60 million euros. And, as Pasona and Energaia show, this is only the beginning.
Translation in Gunter Fables
The Business of Farming in the City is translatered into the fable #58 with the same title "Farming in the City". It is dedicated to mohamed huge, who inspired the creation of this cluster in 2008 with his decision to create the lufa farm in montreal. The fable will be published in May 2015 in China. Additional Fables Will Be Written on the Urban Farming Case in 2016.
Documentation
http://start.org/urbanag/
http://www.dezeen.com/2013/09/12/pasona-urban-farm-by-kono-designs/
