Category: agriculture
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On Agrarian Urbanism
An opportunity for point-counterpoint on the topic of Agrarian Urbanism – one that, with the recent explosion of discussion and interest in urban agriculture – is vital to discussing the place of food in the city, and what impact this will have on the form and function of our urban agglomerations. The topic is poignant…
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Restoring the Garden of Eden
A great feature from Spiegel Online covers the work of Azzam Alwash, a US/Iraqi hydraulic engineer aiming to restore what were once vibrant wetlands flourishing in the cradle of civilization through an organization called Nature Iraq. While most news coming from the region focuses on bricks and mortar rebuilding, it’s important to note the power…
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Branden Born on Urban Ag
Cascadia Region Green Building Council:Transformational Lecture Featuring Branden Born Tuesday, June 155:30-7:00PMWhite Stag Building70 NW Couch Urban Food & Agriculture: Making the Jump in SustainabilityDr. Branden Born, Assistant Professor of Urban Design and Planning from the University of Washington, will offer his thoughts on how we can make the connection between equity and sustainability in…
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Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Installations
Examples of ephemeral productive agricultural landscapes give an indication of the possibilities of occupation of urban sites for education and growing food. LAND GRAB CITYA recent installation called Landgrab City as part of the Shenzhen & Hong Kong bi-city Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. Designers Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson and José Esparza have created a farm in…
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Ephemeral Urban Gardens: Temporality + Mobility
The last remnants of ephemera sitting around the archives is under the auspices of terrestrially based gardens within the foodsheds of our cities, and – and the need to address the issues of permanence (both the pros and cons). One option is to incorporate food production within our permanent landscaping by using the principles of…
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Rooftop Agriculture
I’ve purposely steered away from the pure rooftop farms in discussions of vertical farming solutions recently featured (here, here, here, and here). This isn’t due to any particular reason other than I think that rooftop farms area a separate typology in it’s own right – as it is focusing on a separate area of emphasis…
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Vertical Agriculture (Back to Earth)
Digging through the archives based on the last couple of posts, I was definitely struck by the myriad shapes and sizes that these vertical farming proposals take and the overall excitement that has grown in a short amount of time. This caused me to want to dissect them a bit further in terms of form…
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Vertical Agriculture (From Outer Space)
While I continue this impromptu study of the current state of Vertical Agriculture – it’s important to realize that the ingenuity of humans is always a factor. Industrialization of growing food is a long-standing feature of agriculture – which has probably simultaneously done the most good for productivity and the most harm in severing our…
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Vertical Agriculture (Modest Proposals)
While the flights of fancy that drive many of the concepts of vertical farming are quite breathtaking, there’s a subset of these projects that, while not quite ready for the pages of design magazines, have much more applicability for building-integrated agriculture in new construction and retrofits. A simple and much discussed example that has been…
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Vertical Agriculture + Solar Access
It’s been a bit since I’ve posted on Vertical Agriculture – but an architecture studio I’m helping with at Portland State has a number of students pursuing food production as part of their buildings relating to urban ecology – and has me again thinking of the practicality of these building-based growth modules. While intrigued by…