Executive Summary:
A large portion of the world's less privileged population lacks easy access to fresh, healthy fruits and vegetables. As rural areas become increasingly depopulated and cities expand to overflowing, food security is becoming a global concern. In response to this situation, peri-urban and urban agriculture is evolving. Through integrated biosystems that cascade nutrients and energy, soils deemed unsuitable for agriculture can be repurposed. Urban agriculture creates value from underutilized spaces, such as flat roofs, but can also be incorporated into urban design to transform the interiors of buildings. In doing so, not only is food grown, but the building's property value is also increased by generating additional income, reducing costs, and increasing foot traffic. Furthermore, plants can be used in sewage systems as part of wastewater treatment, recycling "waste" into nutrients. This agricultural system offers new objectives for resource efficiency and contributes to climate change mitigation.
Keywords: Urban agriculture, peri-urban agriculture, integrated biosystems, greenhouses, practical sustainability, equitable waste, five kingdoms of nature, climate change.
Integrated biosystems and agriculture:
My meeting with Professor George Chan in Beijing in 1994 radically changed my view of agriculture. This Mauritian-born sanitary engineer, a graduate of Imperial College London, had worked for two decades for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S.-controlled Pacific islands. At the age of 59, he decided to take early retirement and return to his ancestral home in Guangzhou, China. He intended to restore his grandparents' house and create a library there containing all his work, while also learning traditional Chinese farming methods. He had witnessed China's burgeoning urbanization and observed how traditional techniques were being integrated into the rapidly growing new cities. George became my mentor in agriculture, particularly urban agriculture. Initially, he called it "integrated farming systems," but over the years, we started calling it "integrated biosystems" (IBS) because we wanted to move 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 they had a lot in common but had decided to pursue different paths. Permaculture was originally inspired by the rock gardens of the Native Americans of New Mexico and followed the logic of early biological discoveries by combining plants, animals, and minerals. The results are impressive, and permaculture has become a global trend for efficient, small-scale agriculture that uses available resources. While I never worked directly with Bill Mollison, we did work extensively with Jerome Ostenkowski, one of the founders of permaculture in the United States, who expanded the Basalt permaculture farm in Colorado by adding fungi and algae. He was the first to demonstrate how peri-urban agriculture at 2,000 meters altitude in rocky soil could produce food year-round. However, our interest in improving yields using available resources was inspired by the extraordinary work of George Chan. George created productive food and energy units, operated with plants, animals, bacteria, and algae, on plots of land where it was thought nothing would grow. According to George, those who believe soil is poor do not understand nature. He firmly believes that every type of soil can be dramatically improved, provided an integrated farming technique is designed where the digester and the organic waste cycle play a central role. Professor Li Kangmin, from the Asia-Pacific Regional Research and Training Centre for Integrated Aquaculture (IFFC), based in Wuxi, China, enriched George's Integrated Biosystems (IBS) with his perspective on raising fish, focusing on the efficient circulation of nutrients and energy. They have a great deal of mutual respect. I was so impressed by George and Professor Li's practical approach that I funded the establishment of an integrated biosystem at Montfort Boys Town, on the outskirts of Suva, the capital of Fiji. Following a visit arranged by HE Robin Yarrow, Fiji's Ambassador to Japan, based in Tokyo, I decided that this vocational training school was an ideal platform to demonstrate the logic advanced by George. He was pleased to lead the IBS project, integrating the five kingdoms from start to finish. He relocated to Fiji for nine months to oversee the initiative and construct the facilities. From the program's inception, the UNDP (Pacific office), Hiroyuki Fujimura, CEO of EBARA Corporation (Japan), and Kazuhiko Nishi, president of ASCII (Japan), provided broader support and additional funding. George had a hunch that if the five kingdoms of nature were integrated into all agriculture, as categorized by Dr. Lynn Margulis, co-author of the GAIA theory with James Lovelock, the level of food and energy production would surpass even the most chemically and genetically advanced programs. This hypothesis needed to be tested. Professor Motoyuki Suzuki, from the Institute of Industrial Science (IIS) at the University of Tokyo, traveled to the site and, with a team of doctoral students, demonstrated that the farming method was carbon neutral. Mr. Nishi, the Japanese entrepreneur, shipped the scientific equipment to Fiji to undertake the food and energy cycle with the aim of demonstrating the carbon neutrality of the research.
Integrated biosystems in action:
George designed the entire system, starting with a pigpen. He carefully divided the hectare into two pens, each housing 60 pigs. He mastered every detail, from training the pigs to defecate in specific areas and maintaining the pens in a state of cleanliness beyond the comprehension of agricultural students to simplifying maintenance. The pigs were fed primarily spent substrate from mushroom cultivation, which was essentially brewer's grains from the local brewery, located a few kilometers from Montfort School. The pig manure was fed into a three-chamber digester that produced the biogas used to sterilize the mushroom substrate. The digester sludge was mineralized in seaweed ponds, and the seaweed was used as a feed additive for the pigs. Water flowed from the seaweed ponds into the fishpond, stimulating the growth of zooplankton and phytoplankton. High-quality topsoil was used to create dikes, which were then covered with grass that was cut daily and thrown into the fishpond. This allowed for the construction of a three-meter-deep pond by raising the dikes by just one meter.
The pond's rich water contained fish living at seven different trophic levels and was used to irrigate the clay soil, originally classified as unsuitable for agriculture. Thanks to the pond water, at least two harvests a year were obtained, defying the logic of fertility. George concludes with a smile: "We raise fish without feeding them. We feed the fish!" I have visited Fiji five times and witnessed the project in action. George and his team created courses at the University of the South Pacific, and we observed the production of animal protein, the harvesting of starch- and carbohydrate-rich plants, and the cultivation of algae abundant in beta-carotene. Excess nutrients in the ponds were removed by floating rice gardens. There was nothing more rewarding than drinking the first pot of rice. In 1997, I drank tea brewed with biogas from the digester with Mr. Ratu Kamisese Mara, the President of Fiji.
The Fiji case allowed me to see how Integrated Biosystems Systems (IBS) evolve from idea to reality and how it can be implemented in a peri-urban environment. Hundreds of young boys learned how to operate the farm and left with the technical knowledge to recreate it on their own islands. George enjoyed the experience, and when the opportunity arose to implement the same concept in Tsumeb, Namibia, we quickly rolled out the know-how to Africa. After meeting all expectations in the hot and humid islands of the South Pacific, George went to work on-site in Namibia for nine months in a desert environment. It was a challenge, especially on the cold, windy winter nights. But George was determined to complement the construction of Namibian Breweries' sorghum brewery with an Integrated Building Society (IBS) project that included a mushroom farm using sorghum waste (the raw material for beer), a piggery, a digester, an algae pond, and a fishpond. Mr. Werner List, Chairman of the Ohlthaver & List Group, with the support of his Vice Chairman, Udo Stritter, and Bernd Masche, CEO of Namibian Breweries, provided their full cooperation and co-financed 50% of the project, with the ZERI Foundation covering the other half. Mr. Sam Nujoma, President of Namibia, even came to have a cup of tea as a sign of support for sustainability that was not just theoretical, but practical. When, years later, the brewery closed due to a lack of demand for industrially produced sorghum beer, the mushroom farm continued to operate using elephant grass and pruning waste from the local orchard as a substrate. The heads of state of Fiji and Namibia attended the 3rd World Zero Emissions Congress in Jakarta, Indonesia, in 1997. They gave a powerful testimony of how the IBS had changed their perceptions of food security and climate change. The IBS in Fiji operated exceptionally well until a coup forced HE Ratu Kamisese Mara, known as the founding father of Fiji and a strong supporter of the project, to resign. The school had to close. Brother Thomas, who managed the facility, faced so many challenges that operations suffered greatly, and the equipment remained unmaintained for almost a year and a half. We have a documentary film from Australia and a major photo essay by Luis Camargo, who visited Fiji just months before the political upheaval caused a discontinuity. The Montfort Boys Town project was one of the seven highlights of the 2000 World Expo in Hanover, Germany, and two of the students spent five months at the expo explaining to the public what they had learned. We also have
the edited version of the proceedings of the 1998 UNDP-funded Regional Scientific Meeting on Fiji, 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-Chancellor of the University of Namibia, succeeded Professor Carl-Göran Hedén on the ZERI Scientific Council and thus participated in the documentation process. He had documented the Integrated Biodiversity Study (IBS) of the Tunweni Brewery, part of the Ohlthaver & List Group, in the mining town of Tsumeb, just outside the Etosha Pan in Namibia, in another series of proceedings supported by UNESCO. This documentation, along with the experience of the Songhai Centre in Benin (case 101), provided firsthand insight into how peri-urban agriculture could function and set new standards for farming. The main conclusion was that George and Professor Li's approach not only achieved the highest yields but also generated the best incomes for farmers and eliminated the need for synthetic products, since the combination of the five kingdoms of "waste equals food" is fueled by abundant sunshine and water.3 The results were not only embarrassing for proponents of genetic modification, but they also demonstrated that farming communities are essential for ensuring the livelihoods of the poor and the quality of food for 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 Jiangsu (江苏省) Province. Our host was Professor
Li Kangmin, who had participated in the ZERI World Congresses in Namibia, where he visited the brewery site, and in Colombia, where he observed urban mushroom cultivation in the city of Manizales. I returned to Wuxi four times: first to observe the interesting agricultural techniques in the city center, then for the IFFC (International Federation of Chinese Culture), and finally because my first fables in Chinese were published in cooperation with the Wuxi Association for the Promotion of Science and Technology. This rapidly industrializing region, with a GDP exceeding one trillion dollars—half that of California and 50% of India's—has maintained an agricultural component in its local economy. This can be explained by a historical reason: the population of Wuxi was saved from starvation in the early 1960s thanks to the urban cultivation of water spinach, azola, and chlorella, and its integrated fish farming techniques, which are centuries-old traditions and part of water management. While this approach to food security is only viable in cities where water is plentiful, it has been pointed out that every major city, even when there is a (perceived) water shortage, has an excess of wastewater. This water is considered polluted by some and excessively nutrient-rich by others, but remains unused for productive purposes by most.
Professor Li showed me how the biological waste system of Wuxi City could create a vast food production system. He never had formal training as a biologist, but as a junior military officer, he was concerned about the livelihoods of Wuxi's people and started cultivating water spinach when the need was high. Without nutrient-rich biological waste, the spinach wouldn't grow. When the spinach grows, its roots provide exceptional food for grass-feeding carp. The more the carp nibble on the floating roots, the more the spinach grows. Professor Li saw this symbiosis develop. It aligned with Professor George Chan's proposals. According to him, a high biological oxygen demand (BOD) isn't a problem; it implies a high concentration of nutrients and therefore the need to design intensive nutrient removal through plants (floating gardens), algae (azolla and chlorella), and fish (at every trophic level).
Agriculture and wastewater:
The third excursion took us to the United States. While the country doesn't excel in sustainability, many scientists and entrepreneurs have tackled new and inspiring techniques for combining 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 into food for plants and fish. Richard Perl, a New York-based social activist and entrepreneur who has supported many of my initiatives for decades, took me to South Burlington, Vermont, to see John's pioneering work in 1999. The city of South Burlington was a familiar area to me. It's close to the headquarters of Ben & Jerry's, the socially conscious ice cream maker. I had visited Ben Cohen, one of the co-founders, in 1993 and traveled around the region to learn about the impact of social leadership as demonstrated by Ben & Jerry's. To have a year-round wastewater treatment system in a region characterized by harsh, cold winters, John proposed and installed the system 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 state of winter dormancy during the biological treatment of waste at my detergent factory in Belgium, where they operated on reed beds. I had considered using the exothermic reaction of soap to control the air temperature in a large greenhouse, but my team deemed the cost prohibitive. I didn't yet know that John Todd could generate the additional revenue needed to finance this extra investment.
John Todd's wastewater treatment system in South Burlington converted 10% of the city's wastewater into a source of nutrients and clean water. Its success attracted the interest of many investors, and one of them made a financial offer that John couldn't refuse. Unfortunately, a pure pursuit of money and profit led to a break with John Todd's social and ecological inspiration: he shared his expertise with students from around the world, only to later antagonize the investor who used trademarks and intellectual property (IP) as the basis of his revenue model. It took John Todd more than a decade to rebuild his name and reputation. Despite the hardships he faced, his eco-design company continued to grow. In the meantime, he was appointed Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources at the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. Sadly, John Todd is not alone in his struggle to maintain a balance between open access to know-how and the preservation of original intellectual property.
Urban agriculture and self-sufficiency:
My fourth field trip to study urban agriculture took me to Brasília, the capital of Brazil. Mr. Cassio Taniguchi, former mayor of Curitiba and Brasília's Minister of Planning, showed me how urban planners in the 1960s allocated land around the newly created city to immigrant farmers, primarily from Japan. This farmland, combined with an abundant water supply, now provides 90 percent self-sufficiency in fruits and vegetables for the city's two million inhabitants. Food is cheap in Brasília, not because of efficient large-scale agriculture in Mato Grosso or cheap imports from Chile, but because of the ingenuity of the founding fathers of the new capital, who included food and water security in their plans. The only other city in the world that achieves this level of food security within its boundaries is Havana, Cuba, the subject of our fifth field study. This situation is not the result of chance, but of necessity. The determined and resourceful Cuban citizens, due to the US boycott and the collapse of the Soviet Union, were deprived of fertilizers and food. This forced a fresh start in agriculture. The results are equally impressive: not only was the city able to ensure food security, but the population's diet changed for the better, as evidenced by health indicators. The limited availability of dairy and meat products encouraged the population to adopt a healthy diet, resulting in a significant decrease in heart disease and diabetes.
Experiences from different continents and expert opinions provided by the ZERI network of scientists inspired us to take on the challenge of urban agriculture. Our young research team, based at the UNEP offices in Geneva, has documented numerous other cases through literature reviews. At the beginning of the third millennium, we knew that every corner of a city, whether a balcony, a roof, a kitchen, or a bathroom, could become a green oasis. We envisioned the creation of the "green city" because the design team at 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 carbon neutral, mitigating the risks associated with climate change, and achieving full employment and healthier living conditions.
Innovations in urban agriculture:
Tina Schmidt, from the German Institute for Entrepreneurship and later a colleague of Professor Günter Faltin, who teaches entrepreneurship at the Free University of Berlin, taught students how to use the moisture from kitchens and bathrooms to grow mushrooms. The course was repeated and supplemented with further scientific data at the Technical University of Hamburg-Haarburg, under the direction of Professor Dr. Ralf Otterpohl, director of the Institute for Wastewater and Water Protection, who launched courses on integrated water use. Professor Otterpohl had organized the first courses at the ZERI pavilion at the Hanover World Expo in the autumn of 2000 and became one of the founders of ZERI in Germany. Over the next two years, more than 200 students put the experiments into practice, including growing mushrooms in the city center. The smallest productive gardens measure only 1.20m x 1.20m. Since balconies are designed to support 300 kg/m², a lot can be packed into a small space with good sun and rain exposure. All uncooked biomass will end up in an efficient composting cycle. Food would be produced using fast-rotating herbs, vegetables, and flowers, ensuring food availability, convenience, and beautification of the home. Working with students, we realized there's another reason to grow food in dorms, houses, and any available nook or cranny: it reduces costs and therefore increases purchasing power, while also providing free access to healthy food that is usually too expensive for those on a tight budget.
The power of urban agriculture lies not only in the food itself, but also in the money it saves. Everything produced and consumed locally requires minimal packaging, improving resource efficiency. This leads us to the impact of urban agriculture on climate change. A recent assessment of urban and peri-urban agriculture in nine cities across Africa and Asia<sup>5</sup> demonstrated the extent to which the developing world can contribute to mitigating climate change if food is produced locally. The potential contribution of industrialized countries and megacities is even more extreme: food is part of a supply chain that includes trucks stuck in traffic, refrigerated distribution centers with energy-intensive chemical controls for pests and molds that pose a health risk. For a long time, the ZERI network found few creative approaches in the Northern Hemisphere. The most inspiring initiatives were found in the developing world.
Urban agriculture in the first world:
There are, of course, exceptions. For example, there are a few initiatives concerning catfish farming, which began in the 1960s in the Mississippi Delta (USA). Initially, the feed consisted of organic waste, but as farmers sought greater productivity and faster yields, the feed shifted to GMO soy and slaughterhouse waste, unfortunately imported and thus draining revenue from the local economy. A team in Berlin proposes raising catfish on rooftops using feed imported from the Netherlands. It's easy to see how expensive this process can be. The only ones making money are the equipment vendors and the fish feed suppliers. The ZERI network doesn't simply replace one "input-output" model with another, but goes beyond the simplicity of the "food input - meat output" model. We are implementing the nutrient and energy cascade and repurposing existing infrastructure, as Jan Willem Bosman Jansen did when he converted the former flower bulb greenhouses in the city of Egmont (Netherlands) into mushroom cultivation units, or Siemen Cox and Marc Slegers, who transformed a former swimming pool (Tropicana) in Rotterdam into a mushroom training and cultivation center.
Greenhouse experiments from the United States to the Netherlands are interesting for urban agriculture in a temperate climate. Encouragingly, former mayor Michael Bloomberg strongly supported urban agriculture because it allows for rainwater harvesting and diverts it from the sewers, reducing the number of trucks on the roads and thus decreasing greenhouse gas emissions. Today, New York City is the leader in urban agriculture in the United States, which in America does not necessarily mean enormous volume, but rather that capital is flowing into commercial ventures. 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), founded by Ted Caplow and led by CEO Paul Lightfoot, has raised $20 million in capital and supplies major supermarkets with $130 million in annual food sales. New York City is taking things a step further and has decided to launch a 20,000-square-meter rooftop farm on its food distribution center in the Bronx.
Urban agriculture and real estate value:
While I appreciated all the initiatives and visited them to understand the business logic, particularly their fundraising capabilities and the power to communicate a need for change through exceptionally designed websites, it wasn't until I saw Lufa Farms in Montreal, Canada, that I gained a clear understanding of the emerging business model: increasing the value of real estate. Mohamed Huge, the founder and driving force behind the Lufa Farms concept, revisited his childhood dreams in the suburbs of Beirut, where every house had a farm, only to discover that the most logical place to farm is on a rooftop. The strength of Mohamed's proposition brought together a diverse team: Yahya Badran, an internet entrepreneur who immigrated to Canada; Yahya Badran, a Romanian immigrant with a degree in construction engineering; and Lauren Rathmell, a Canadian graduate student eager to apply her plant studies. The creation of this team was arguably the most significant factor in Lufa Farms' success. They even succeeded in getting the city's building codes amended to facilitate urban agriculture, as New York had done.
The main lesson wasn't just the logic of the greenhouse and the selection of fruits and vegetables; it was the relevance of the financial benefits beyond the sale of produce—what we in the blue economy call "multiple benefits, including multiple cash flows." Building a greenhouse represents an additional cost for the farmer but provides significant energy savings for the occupants in both winter and summer. Similarly, energy-efficient buildings have a higher market value, and unique buildings (especially shopping centers) attract more visitors, generating additional revenue. Additional income for the occupants of a project translates into higher value. This enables partnerships between people who—at first glance—have little in common but who can work together to design a highly competitive urban agriculture model. A member of our research network pointed out that urban rooftop farms have a major competitor in rooftop solar installations. I'm pleased about that, but is it really competition? We see urban agriculture and rooftop electricity generation as complementary initiatives. Given the amount of unused roof space, which is in the millions of square meters, it will be decades before we experience a shortage! The increase in property values is directly linked to energy savings and the resulting improved cash flow, which can be added to the urban agriculture business model. This is 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 rooftop farms covering more than a thousand square meters worldwide, we are witnessing several pioneering initiatives, such as the microalgae cultivation on the rooftops of Bangkok, Thailand, by Saumil Shah of the startup EnerGaia (energaia.com). Spirulina production is rapid, doubling every 24 hours, capturing CO2 and mitigating climate change while providing high-quality nutrition.
Urban agriculture and design:
The most visionary example comes from Japan, where the Pasona Group (株式会社パソナ)
created an iconic office building with urban agriculture integrated within it. Standing inside the building, I feel the same way I did when I built the world's first green factory, located in Malle, Belgium. The Pasona Group is a staffing agency with offices worldwide. Its headquarters in central Tokyo's Ohtemachi district was initially conceived as the restoration of a former office building. Dialogues between Yoshimi Kono, the designer, Kenji Furushiro, Pasona's president, and Yasuyuki Nambu, the CEO, resulted in a truly refreshing approach. Pasona's leadership team had adopted "Solutions to Society's Problems" as their corporate slogan. Everyone agreed that the best way to demonstrate the company's seriousness in developing individuals capable of tackling the major challenges facing society was to build a headquarters that embodied what it stood for. When I first visited Pasona, I felt transported back to 1992, to the opening of the wooden factory with a grass roof. In the heart of Tokyo, the 20,000-square-meter office building dedicates 4,000 square meters to green spaces, home to over 200 species of plants, fruits, vegetables, and rice. It is the world's largest "farm-to-table" office in a city center: everything produced is consumed in the cafeteria. This type of work environment changes the way people think: if your office is off the beaten path, you'll think outside the box.
Pasona doesn't just want to promote urban agriculture; it wants to create new urban farmers. They aim to spark interest in a modern lifestyle with a different kind of office environment, while ensuring their professionals' active lifestyles are complemented by educational programs on Japanese agricultural practices adapted to an urban setting. Inside the office, tomato vines hang above conference tables; lemon and passion fruit trees separate meeting spaces; salads grow in seminar rooms; and beans sprout under the benches. The design isn't dictated by green building standards, energy-saving practices, or the desire for high-quality indoor air. It's a place where people can reflect on their daily tasks, their personal career choices, and the path each can take toward the future.
Agriculture in the cities of the future:
What Pasona is doing embodies the very essence of the blue economy: changing the paradigm. The urban agriculture program offers a solution to certain societal problems. It is unique to find corporate headquarters that have introduced urban agriculture, and exceptional for it to be used to transform the workforce. This case clearly demonstrates that new business models cannot be fully captured in a traditional business plan. We are confident that urban agriculture will grow from over 1,000 large-scale initiatives worldwide to at least 10,000 within a decade.
Cities will modify building codes, and investors will seek economies of scale in urban agriculture, the size of which is limited by the irregular space available on rooftops, particularly on commercial and industrial buildings. For every thousand square meters of urban farms, there is the potential to create 12 direct and indirect jobs, reducing the distance people travel to work and the distance food travels. This means that 12,000 jobs have already been created, but we see a global potential of at least 25 million jobs in urban agriculture within a decade. The projects we have worked on and learned from have mobilized investments of around €60 million. And, as Pasona and EnerGaia demonstrate, this is just the beginning.
Gunter's Fables Translation
The business of farming in the city is translated 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/
