michelle kaufmann designs

Last Thursday we had a fabulous Re:Vision Salon on “Urban Agriculture” with Josiah Raisin Cain (Chief Design Officer with Design Ecology) and Urban Re:Vision. Urban Agriculture has become one of the hottest movements in the  sustainable design world. And rightly so. As Josiah described, the ideas with Urban Agriculture “are close to exploding” given recent media, products, planning and design focus. Josiah spoke about some unsettling (and for me, unknown) facts such as the average miles travelled for the average meal in the US (including miles for processing food) is 3000 miles. That is completely absurd as well as unsustainable. Another crazy fact he shared is that it takes the amount of water equivalent to one person’s showers for a year to produce one pound of beef.

Urban Edible Gardens solve many problems simultaneously. It helps reduce gas, cost, water (depending on system used), while increasing social justice and community connection. Challenges typically include space and scale. However, there are alternative ways of imagining our cities. Josiah showed projects with successful green roofs with edible gardens like this one at Trent University.

The green roofs reduce storm water runoff, act as increased insulation, increase oxygen, reduce cooling loads, and provide local food. They can be on the top roof of the building, or be on intermediate roof gardens, like this project by Daniel Libeskind.

And of course, you could do on your decks and walls of decks as well.

There are alternatives to the deep soil-based gardens that make sense when we plant them in the ground. There are Hydroponic systems and Aquaponic systems that use much less water by providing their own nutrients. Companies like InkaWall (Paul Giacomantonio from Inkawall was at the Salon) offer systems like this “BioCloth” that is 1” thick and can be hung outside or inside and produces food that hangs off of the cloth, using much less water than would be required if they were planted in the ground using traditional methods.  With proper lighting and ventilation, these can even be planted inside of a building as well. You could grow your own food in your downtown loft.

We have incorporated green roofs and used hydroponics boxes for planting food at the Smart Home exhibit (the mkSolaire) in Chicago.

Josiah spoke about how “slick” our current city buildings are. Water slides right off of them, creating many expensive problems for the city with storm water run-off. By integrating green walls and green roofs, it has the added benefit of making the buildings more “sticky”, and reducing storm-water run-off issues for cities, and reducing the costs required to sove those problems.

It all is so delicious visually, socially and physically. It also seems accessible and feasible. Hearing Josiah, Paul and others in the group speak about their project’s successes with green walls, roofs, and integrated urban gardening systems, I am excited and can’t wait to be incorporating some of these technologies into communities I am working on.  As Paul noted, “Urban Gardens can create prosperity where there is currently zero.”

For more info:
Urban Gardens at the Smart Home in Chicago
Trent University Green Roof

Fytowall
Inka Wall
The ABLE project
Elliot Coleman
Sky Vegetables

Photos by the very talented Paige Green. www.paigegreenphotography.com