Understanding the complexities of Building-Integrated Agriculture. Can food shape the future built environment?

Our food system is facing an unprecedented challenge: feeding a fast growing population without depleting precious resources like energy, soil, and water.Furthermore, the increasing urbanization has rapidly exacerbated the gap between farm to plate, leaving cities vulnerable to changes in the production and supply chain, as demonstrated by recent pandemics and wars. In this context, emerging technologies that allow plants to grow in absence of soil, permit to produce food in high densely built-up areas, bringing food production right were most consumers live. These initiatives enter within the so called Building-Integrated Agriculture (BIA), which is referred as the practice of locating greenhouses and soilless plant cultivation technologies on top and inside mixed-use buildings to exploit the synergies between the building environment and agriculture, involving resource recovery such as water, energy and nutrient flows. This paper aims at determining strategies, objectives, and best practices of BIA projects through the review of 21 case studies, to understand how a new advanced and future-oriented agriculture applied within the cities borders, can possibly shape the urban built environment and food systems of the future

Dalle Superillas al Tactical Greenery. Sperimentazioni e strategie transcalari di rigenerazione vegetale dello spazio urbano

New urban action, based on the development of green areas as a strategic tool for upgrading the city from an environmental, social and cultural point of view, is at its most innovative, the result of transversal initiatives at different levels by a variety of subjects. Experimentation and policies relating to the city and its neighbourhoods interact and are enriched in their relationship with local strategies and networks of punctual micro-interventions through spontaneous, bottom-up initiatives. This paper intends to highlight how today, in the varied design of the city, there is a common thread between large-scale planning experiences (municipal metropolitan plans), those on a neighbourhood scale of the Superillas, the Ville du Quart d’Heure and those on a small scale of Tactical Greenery. The common goal of creating green infrastructure for the future will be to permeate city living spaces

Evaluating the impacts of nutrients recovery from urine wastewater in Building-Integrated Agriculture. A test case study in Amsterdam

Recent studies concerning the integration of agricultural practices in cities demonstrated that Urban Agriculture (UA) can boost new sustainable urban developments. New technologies allow to integrate soil-less cultivation in- and on- mixed-use buildings, creating new synergies between the built environment and the urban food system. Accordingly, resource flows from buildings are an untapped opportunity for the creation of circular urban metabolisms that rely on recycling waste as input for food production systems. On this trail, this research work focuses on evaluating the feasibility of using urine and greywater streams as nutrient solution in a theoretical model of Building-Integrated Agriculture (BIA) located in Amsterdam. Results showed that it is feasible to use urine and greywater as nutrient solutions (NS). However, treated urine showed higher concentration of macronutrients compared to fertilizer recipes found in literature, and therefore needed to be diluted with increasing amount of greywater to match either N or P concentration. Accordingly, P deficiencies in the plants or excessive N concentration were found in the final wastewater-based NS. Future research is highly recommended to assess the quality of plants grown in BIA systems as well as the possible content of harmful viruses and bacteria in the harvested produce