Food in the City: Enabling Integrated Solutions for Urban Agriculture and Food Production in Buildings

This contribution starts from the consideration that urbanization, which has brought half of the world population living in the cities, appears to be irreversible and, as a consequence, the number of megalopolis is constantly increasing. The always growing demand of food in great urban areas makes alimentation one of the biggest problems which is being carried on by the uncontrolled development of cities. Aim of the paper is to underline the role of buildings’ design towards the realization of circular Urban Agriculture projects. Recently, the combination of factors like industrialized agriculture and global food chain, together with worldwide issues like urbanization and migration brought the debate over topic such as food security and safety to the attention of the European Union. As a consequence, countries and big municipalities like Amsterdam, London, Bruxelles and Vienna decided to act promoting projects of Urban Agriculture. In this scenario, a group composed by professors and researchers from University of Florence (Architecture) and Bologna (Agricultural sciences) joined forces to design a Vertical Farm in Amsterdam. The “Living Tower” focused on the retrofitting action of one of the existing towers of the former Bijlmerbajes prison complex in Amsterdam. The project won the first prize at the EcoGreenTech award in the category “Studies, Researches, Patents, Thesis & Prototypes concerning the green hi-tech”. The effort of interdisciplinary team was oriented to demonstrate that it’s possible to imagine the architectonic environment as a living organism, part of a new food production chain, sponsoring zero kilometer products. Buildings’ sustainable comfort is here improved while their energy consumptions is reduced. Thus, the goals we wanted to achieve with our proposal was to promote a healthy lifestyle and raising awareness on how to environmentally behave by keeping the ecological footprint as low as possible.