TOWARDS A PRODUCTIVE ARCHITECTURE High-tech food production technologies integrated in Architecture for the implementation of new circular Urban Agriculture models

Urban Agriculture has seen a growing interest in recent years and planners, engineers, and architects joined agronomists in proposing farming projects within the cities’ boundaries. The reason for the recent success of UA is not only to be found in its ability to increase global food production but also in its possibility to implement targeted circular flows of resources in urban areas, offering new opportunities for sustainable city development. Indeed, due to climate changes, population growth and the already high urbanization, resources like energy and water are becoming scarcer and scarcer, as their cost keeps rising up. In this sense, promoting UA upcycling projects in urban areas might be fundamental to recover these finite resources while fostering a new typology of green architecture. Furthermore, today more than ever, shifting towards new circular and sustainable food systems is crucial as industrial agriculture is the most resource-consuming human activity on this planet, with 70% of freshwater usage, 50% of global habitable land usage, and 26% of global greenhouse emissions. In this regard, modern off-soil agro technologies represent a big opportunity to bring part of the agricultural production right within the cities’ boundaries, reducing soil, water, and energy consumption, creating metabolic flows of resources between the urban built environment and the food production systems. In this scenario, food production should be considered a full-fledged new paradigm of green urban planning. Starting from these considerations, the aim of this research is to answer the question of how we can re-use residential buildings’ waste streams as a resource for urban food production, specifically focusing on water and nutrients recovery from domestic wastewater. As a result, this thesis wants to propose green building design strategies that will facilitate the construction of a metabolic architecture through the integration of off-soil hydroponic systems as final domestic wastewater treatment.