Our Future Environment

It’s already well blogged, this vertical farming idea, and its currently the 8th most emailed article on the NYTimes.

Vertical farming is currently only conceptual and is the work of a Columbia professor, Dickson Despommier (of the apple trees) and his grad students. It begins with a skyscraper used to raise food such as fruit, vegetables, fish, and livestock using greenhouse growing methods and recycled resources year-round. Vertical farms would encourage eating locally, using less petro-based energy, and reduce the need for large scale horizontal farmland.

Vertical farming caught my interest today because I noticed that the idea has been around for almost 10 years but is just now swimming in the zeitgeist. Most comments about the idea are positive even while recognizing it will take plenty of money and planning to appear. It was rumored earlier this year that Vegas was building a vertical farm but it seems that such plans are non-existent.

The vertical farm is just one example of how people are beginning to see the connections between our urban space and our needs as living organisms. The vertical farm professor, Despommier, also writes about medical ecology, the idea that our health is linked to the physical and natural environment around us. It’s not a crazy idea, and is a given in environmental psychology or urban public health studies. Despommier must be on the same track as environmental psychologists if he is making these connections between architecture, health and innovative thinking for our future.

Filed under: farm, city, future, environmental planning on July 16th, 2008