Shared Space for Urban Agriculture: Spectra’s Rooftops
This post is part of Spectra Cities’ “Ten Stories of Urban Design” series. Explore our Spatial.io spaces for a first-person experience of these stories on mobile, desktop, or headset. Join our Discord to become a member of the Spectra community. Follow along on Twitter for daily updates and events info.
Nutrition in Cities Today
Have you ever wondered where your food comes from?
How far away the ingredients were grown, and how long it took to transport them to your plate?
If you live in or have lived in a city, take a minute to think about the last time you saw local produce for sale. Or, maybe just think about a city that you visited recently.
Was the produce being sold at a market, grocer, or chain store? How far was it from your home? Was it more expensive than other food options? How did seeing fresh produce make you feel?
Unfortunately, in many cities today (especially in the US) it is increasingly difficult to find fresh, local produce. They have become food deserts.
One of our core members at Spectra Cities grew up near Norfolk, Virginia, and recalls stories of how grocery stores came to be scarce in many neighborhoods. One example, Berkley, recently went three years without a local grocery store. Another, Olde Huntersville, went one year.
At some point, we as a society switched from growing and selling locally to growing food on megafarms, transporting them thousands of miles, and then having customers drive their car to buy the produce at a store more than a mile from their house.
This switch made some foods cheaper, but at the cost of nutrition, emissions, and access. A mile to the store may not be so far for a fit person on a treadmill, but it can be a serious obstacle for an elderly person without a car on a hot summer day.
The switch also made our economies less resilient. Remember those food shortages throughout the COVID-19 pandemic? In the US, panics over eggs and milk frequently swept the nation.
Urban Rooftop Agriculture in Spectra Cities
These are some of the questions and issues we reflected on when prototyping the initial designs of the urban environment in Spectra Cities.
As a “livable city,” residents should be able to safely, conveniently, affordably, and sustainably meet the majority of their daily needs within their local neighborhood.
For us, tackling the issue of local produce started with a space which is underutilized in most cities today: rooftops.
Spectra’s rooftops are one of the three layers of public space in the city. We wanted to create with the rooftops a replicable solution for urban agriculture that could be deployed according to the needs of each block. Since some blocks’ residents may choose to not incorporate agriculture into their shared courtyard space, it was important for us to reserve space for this on the rooftops.
Block residents can also determine how public they want to their rooftop space to be. One block might open a shared space just for block residents, while another could decide to run a public cafe and connect their rooftop to neighboring blocks with pedestrian bridges. These bridges would facilitate moving farming tools and supplies between blocks.
Nutrition Strategies
To respond to the challenge of supplemental nutrition for hundreds of block residents, we had to research what could be realistically grown on the rooftops without increasing the structural load of the building.
It turns out there’s quite a lot that can be grown in shallow soil. Our rooftop concept shows one way to use solar energy that would be soaked up in order to grow crops. Two of the most interesting strategies we researched and modeled were vertical planting and intercropping, where one species of plant that needs more sunlight shades another that is more sensitive.
Of course, there’s no need for Spectra’s nutrition strategy to be confined to just rooftops. Grocers and markets can be operated throughout the mixed-use first and second floors of the city. Basements can also be used for storing seed, nutrient, root vegetables, and canned goods. The wilderness edge of the city can be home to agroforestry activities.
Land can also be developed around the city for larger scale agricultural and pastoral activities. In these areas, agrivoltaics — the practice of coupling agricultural or pastoral activities with photovoltaic systems — can enable increased yields and supply the city with affordable clean energy.
Measures will likely be needed to prevent pests and inclement weather from damaging crops. The first step will be to locate the city in an ideal climate. The construction of rooftop greenhouses may also be appropriate.
Modeling Urban Rooftop Agriculture in Virtual Reality
As always, the process of co-designing the rooftops started in VR and will eventually transition to an IRL physical project. The ideas presented here are open to change and VR is our shared planning space for discussion, experimentation, and play.
If you’d like a say in designing the rooftops, agricultural practices, or any other part of Spectra’s urban environment, consider joining our Discord and attending one of our weekly community events on Spatial.io!
All of the assets in our Source City Toolkit are free to use and share under a Creative Commons license. Files can be downloaded for Rhino, Blender, Unity, and Spatial.
