We need more vertical farming in cities says Chris Precht
Architects have an urgent mission, says Chris Precht, to bring food production back into the centre of our cities.
Our cities need to become part of our agricultural system. In recent decades it has become increasingly clear that the way we live and eat is a big threat to our health and the health of our ecosystem. Climate change is forcing us to rethink our way of life and to reconnect agriculture back into our urban fabric.
We need architects to reconnect the city with nature, creating buildings that appeal to all of our senses. Bringing the production of food back to our daily lives will not only democratise the food system, but also allow our cities to achieve food security.
There is a close relation between the beginning of agriculture and the birth of architecture. Our cities were shaped by food.
This is because, as the agricultural revolution ended our presence as hunters and gatherers, grain was a stable food source that allowed us to permanently settle. Farming and living were interconnected – they needed to be in close proximity due to a lack of efficient transportation and refrigeration. So all ancient settlements were dense areas with food distribution compounds at their centre and farmland in their surrounding.
A close connection between food and our urban lives is still traceable on the maps of our cities and their street names. Near the River Thames in London you can find Cornhill and Fish Street, because grain and fish came on and from the river, while northern parts of London are named after meat and its production, because animals walked into the city before being slaughtered.
The invention of the railway, pasteurisation and refrigeration changed the delivery system of our food. The production and the consumption no longer depended on close proximity. All of a sudden it was possible to overcome long distances in a short amount of time and the food could be kept fresh for a longer. That made it possible to grow food far away from sight and mind. We became distant to it. We no longer witnessed the slaughtering of pigs or the dirt of the harvest, and merely became consumers of the end product.
With this disconnection to the origin of our food, we lost an understanding of its importance.
Over the years, industrialisation has made farming incredibly efficient when it comes to the amount and profitability of food we produce. But it has made us all dependent on a system that only a handful of multinational cooperations can deliver.
Meanwhile our growing disconnection to food has transformed our urban areas. No longer constrained by farmland, cities have grown indefinitely. They have swallowed up agricultural land and covered the last connection people had with the soil that once fed them. And with the advent of high-rise living, we are more distant than ever to the natural environment.
The problem we are now facing is that food is eating our natural resources. Agriculture occupies more than a third of land on our planet and crop production has led to the deforestation of 40 per cent of our woodland. It uses 70 per cent of our freshwater reserves and emits almost one third of all greenhouse gases.
The way we grow our food is also a big threat to biodiversity, because we mainly grow crops to fatten domesticated animals. And it is about to get worse.
As urban populations grow and more developing countries adopt the western diet, the footprint of our food will increase dramatically. It is estimated that in the next 50 years, more food will be consumed than in the last 10,000 years combined.
The way we produce, consume and waste food is also a massive threat to our health. Issues like obesity, diabetes, and malnutrition are a direct outcome of our unwholesome diet.
The construction industry is equally harmful. We produce 39 per cent of global CO2 and account for more than a third of the world’s energy use.
