Urban Farming’s International Past, Present And Future

“Only since the industrial revolution have we separated food growing from where people live,” says the executive director of the program that has built raised beds in the yards of over 600 urban homeowners.

By Regina Cole
Forbes
Apr 18, 2022

Excerpt:

Urban agriculture as a tourist attraction is being created on a bigger scale in Shanghai, where the Sunqiao Urban Agricultural District will demonstrate food growing in the city and become a research and development center for agricultural science. One subway stop away from the city’s new Disneyland, the 250-acre site will show visitors how food is grown.

“Sunqiao will unite agriculture and technology with tourism,” says Michael Grove, chairman of landscape architecture, civil engineering and ecology at Sasaki, a Boston-area design firm specializing in architecture, interior design, space planning, landscape architecture, ecology, civil engineering and place branding.

“The site was, for 20 years, used for single-story greenhouses. When that ended, the Chinese government held an open-ended competition for designs that would continue the area’s agricultural use, but unite it with technology while making it attractive to tourism.”

Sasaki, which won the competition, has developed a plan for an urban arboretum that serves as a research site for food science.

“The emphasis will be on vertical farms, which accelerate yields and especially lend themselves to leafy greens,” Grove explains. “It is not meant to be the only food-growing technology: it does not lend itself to plants with robust root systems, like rice, grains or nut trees. But for leafy greens, it cuts down on water consumption by 90%, and there is no need for pesticides.”

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