The Harvest Green Project by Canadian Romses Architects, is one of the winning entries in a City of Vancouver 2030 Challenge to create more sustainable urban development with a smaller carbon footprint.
Romses Architects’ design is a vertical farm concept that will supply local organic food to the city, without the steep transportation footprint normally associated with farmed goods.
Currently the average North American meal travels 2,400 km (1,490 miles) to get from field to plate and contains ingredients from 5 countries in addition to our own, explains British Columbia-based FarmFolk/CityFolk. A 2002 Worldwatch report demonstrates that an average North American meal, made with ingredients from a supermarket, consumes 4 to 17 times more petroleum consumption in transport than the same meal made from local ingredients.
The predicted increase of 3 billion people to feed on the planet by 2030 means that current farming methods will not be able to sustain the increase according to the Harvest Green Project designers.
Their vertical farm features fields for growing vegetables, fruit trees, a boutique goat and sheep dairy facility, laying hens, and renewable energy to sustain the tower. The Harvest Green Project is designed to be a sustainable addition to the City of Vancouver, one of the greenest cities in Canada.
“Harvest Green Project explores the notion of the ‘foregrounding’ of a new agri-food system in and around the strategic urban location of an arterial transit hub,” explains Romses Architects' design statement. “To a certain extent, we have seen 20th century town planning disregard the importance of food and farming, and urban development has virtually eliminated agriculture in our cities.”
The architects also explain how, according to Dr. Dickson Despommier, an environmental health scientist at Columbia University, that for every one acre of indoor farming, four to six acres of outdoor land can be saved.
“If successfully implemented, projects like the Harvest Green Project can offer the promise of urban renewal, sustainable production of a safe and varied food supply, year round crop production, and the eventual repair of ecosystems that have been sacrificed for large-scale traditional horizontal farming,” explain the architects.
In addition to the wide range of food production options in the Harvest Green Project, the design includes large scale wind turbines, solar photovoltaic glazing on all the windows, geothermal, a rainwater bio-filtration facility, blackwater recycling, a composting facility, and methane generation from the farm animal’s waste.
Visit: http://www.romsesarchitects.com/
Via: The 2030 Challenge
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