Abstract
In recent years a growing number of urban farming projects have been established in and on buildings. The term “Zero-Acreage Farming” (ZFarming) describes the idea of growing food without using any additional land or acreage. It encompasses open-air rooftop farms, rooftop greenhouses, productive facades, and indoor farming on and in existing or newly built urban structures. Using the urban building stock instead of farmland or vacant parcels involves very distinct opportunities and challenges: specific building-related challenges, technical restraints, regulatory frameworks, reluctance of landlords and developers, but also opportunities for enhanced resource efficiency and the creation of new urban spaces. The objective of this contribution is to examine these peculiarities and discuss the specific opportunities and challenges they imply. The study illustrates site-related requirements, legislative frameworks as well as specific economic risks and opportunities; gives an overview of different stakeholders involved in planning and implementation processes, stressing the role of landlords and developers – their expectations, motivations and fears; and deduces implications for policies, programs and stakeholder management.
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Notes
- 1.
The criteria relied on by different studies on available rooftop spaces for green roofs or rooftop farming vary substantially. Therefore, numbers cannot be compared. For Berlin, the calculation is based on the available area, on flat rooftops, for solar energy. Besides a minimum size of 500 m2, further criteria (building height, use and urban form of the building block) were taken into consideration. Static and structural features of the buildings were not included (ZFarm 2015). For Toronto, “[t]he benefits on a city-wide basis were calculated based on the assumption that 100% of available green roof area can be used. The available green roof area included flat roofs on buildings with more than 350 sq. m. of roof area, and assuming at least 75% of the roof area would be greened. The total available green roof area city-wide was determined to be 5000 hectares (50 million sq. m.)” (Banting et al. 2004).
- 2.
Technische Universität Berlin; inter3 – Institut für Ressourcenmanagement GmbH; ZALF – Leibniz-Zentrum für Agrarlandschaftsforschung e.V.
- 3.
This list is not supposed to be complete or statistically representative. It rather serves the purpose of providing a broad overview of ZFarming practices. Projects that have been realised after 2012 have not been part of the original analysis, but their development has also been studied and relevant findings have been considered for this contribution.
- 4.
i.e. Asian economies with upper-middle-income levels (according to World Bank definitions).
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Thomaier, S. (2017). Zero-Acreage Farming: Challenges and Opportunities for Urban Policies and Partnerships. In: Soulard, CT., Perrin, C., Valette, E. (eds) Toward Sustainable Relations Between Agriculture and the City. Urban Agriculture. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71037-2_10
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