The Role of Urban Farms Within our Cities and Buildings
A few months ago, I wrote a piece on urban farming. The aim was to learn more about a concept I knew little of. Here, I follow up exploring the concept in more detail, focusing specifically on what role they have to play within our cities and buildings.
The Role of Urban Farms Within our Cities and Buildings
Urban Farming
Covid has taught us many things. The importance of green spaces within our cities & buildings is right up there. Whether it be parks, gardens, allotments or urban farms. As we continue to grow our cities and build new buildings, these green spaces must keep on playing a key part. This article will focus on what role urban farms have to play in our future cities and buildings.
Let’s start by defining urban farming. Wikipedia has a good explanation:
Urban farming is the practice of cultivating, processing, and distributing food in urban areas. It encompasses a diverse mix of food production activities, including fisheries and forestry such agriculture, aquaculture, beekeeping, and horticulture.
A recent trend within urban farming is vertical farming. Vertical farming is a technology where crops are placed in vertical layers under artificial light without any soil and are in a climate-controlled environment. Types of vertical farming include hydroponics which grow plants in nutrient-rich water. Aquaponics is another form, which creates a natural ecosystem between fish and plants, where the fish waste becomes plant nutrition and in return, the vegetables clean the water which goes back to the fish. To read more about urban farming read here. To learn more about vertical farming technology, read here and here.
Viability of Urban Farming Within Cities
Research varies on the role of urban farming. The conversation argues that urban farming, specifically vertical farming, has many advantages. These include producing crops all year round, no requirement for chemical products, avoiding environmental factors of traditional farming and eliminating the financial & environmental costs of importing food. They argue the two biggest problems to date are financial and technological viability. On the other hand, Vox argues that although vertical farming has many benefits, the environmental benefits are debatable and are not convinced these will be able to provide food security for entire cities (Johns Hopkins Center). They claim more likely benefits are not food related but more conscious aware consumers, improving local communities and encouraging healthier diets. That in itself might just be a good enough reason to promote urban and vertical farming. What seems likely is that vertical farming will not replace traditional farming, but rather serve as an additional source in the contribution of global food production.
The Role of Urban Farming Within Commercial Buildings
When it comes to urban farms within commercial buildings, these can be a wide variety of things. They can be greenhouses atop warehouses, vertical farms in subway tunnels, allotments on balconies or rooftop gardens in office developments. From a landlord’s perspective, these can be seen as a business model, a value add amenity or a social benefit.
As a business model, the main stumbling block is being able to grow farms on prime real estate in city centres. The most obvious locations are vacant spaces, empty malls or stores, outdated warehouses and class C office buildings. I discuss what to do with vacant spaces here. Landlords can run the farm themselves and sell the produce, or alternatively agree to a revenue sharing model where farmers would operate the farms.
This HBR thesis discusses the business viability of vertical farms. They hypothesise that converting a vacant commercial building into agricultural food production would have a return on investment of 7-8% based on a cheap secondary location. Whilst accepted for traditional real estate, for a high risk venture this would be difficult to justify. Subsidies would be required for returns of 10-20% with the goal of the subsidies providing local jobs, increasing food production and reducing urban blight. This is one piece of research and with limited research to date, not a foregone conclusion on vertical farming’s economic viability. As with all technologies, as it evolves, the product improves and prices become more attractive.
An alternative proposition is having urban farms as value add amenities within buildings. This would arguably make buildings more appealing, attract premium prices and incentivise occupiers to move in. From the occupier’s perspective, if considering two buildings, one vacant with the other testing the concept of urban farming, they might opt for the building with the more innovative, socially conscious landlord. Additionally, these farms can serve as a carbon offset, enabling landlords to meet their ESG criterias, for instance by planting trees within buildings (most likely on terraces and rooftops).
Final Thoughts
As we continue to expand our cities and build new buildings, the hope is that by pushing the concept of urban & vertical farming forward, they will add social, environmental and economical benefits. Social through community living and healthy lifestyles. Environmental through tree planting. Economical through viable business models. All these factors making our cities and buildings more sustainable, healthier, and enjoyable places to live and work in. Whether considered as a business, a value add amenity or a social contribution, it is for city planners and landlords to determine.