Creative Class

Pretty interesting story in New York Magazine by Lisa Chamberlain about Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental sciences and microbiology at Columbia University. Dr. Despommier argues that the answer to the growing food needs of rising urban populations is skyscrapers that house/grow agricultural products instead of businesses and people.

The article is full of great images and information about this idea and the technology behind it. From the piece,

“Urban farming has always been a slightly
quixotic endeavor. From the small animal farm that was perched on the
roof of the Upper West Side’s Ansonia apartment building in the early
1900s (fresh eggs delivered by bellhop!) to community gardens
threatened by real-estate development, the dream of preserving a little
of the country in the city is a utopian one. But nobody has ever
dreamed as big as Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental
sciences and microbiology at Columbia University, who believes that
“vertical farm” skyscrapers could help fight global warming.

Imagine
a cluster of 30-story towers on Governors Island or in Hudson Yards
producing fruit, vegetables, and grains while also generating clean
energy and purifying wastewater. Roughly 150 such buildings, Despommier
estimates, could feed the entire city of New York for a year. Using
current green building systems, a vertical farm could be
self-sustaining and even produce a net output of clean water and
energy.

Despommier
began developing the vertical-farming concept six years ago (his
research can be found at verticalfarm .com), and he has been contacted
by scientists and venture capitalists from the Netherlands to Dubai who
are interested in establishing a Center for Urban Sustainable
Agriculture, either independently or within Columbia. He estimates it
could take a working group of agricultural economists, architects,
engineers, agronomists, and urban planners five to ten years to figure
out how to marry high-tech agricultural practices with the latest
sustainable building technology.”

Check out the professor’s website.

Posted by David

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 4th, 2007 at 1:07 pm and is filed under Creative Class Consumption. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.