About Me
Tuesday, 9 June 2009
Vertical Farming:making history or making hype?
What would the permaculture approach to vertical farming look like?
Most permaculturalist agree that we must grow more food with in our cities, but does that mean inside the buildings of the city itself? Vertical farming has been making some big headlines lately and so I’ve decided to approach some of the latest ideas and innovations and examine them through the lens of permaculture principals. This idea has been around for a while (think terraces in Asia) and has some very strong merits. Bill Mollison remarked that “95 of the cost of food in a city like New York comes from it’s transportation, storage, and packaging.” Growing in a high density fashion has the potential to save ample land and resources if done correctly. But, as a permaculturalist I have some serious reservations about vertical farms. Most of the skyscraper type designs would grow food hydroponically This requires considerable energy and maintenance the trade off being a year long growing season; that is if your not dealing with constant “technical difficulties”. Dickson Despommier the leading proponent of the vertical farming idea had this say, “You can control nothing outdoors, and you can control everything indoors. That means no floods, wildfires, hailstorms, tornadoes, or droughts. Plant diseases and pests are more easily controlled, too, meaning less need for herbicides and pesticides.”
“And indoor agriculture is more efficient. One indoor acre of strawberries can produce as much as 30 outdoor acres can. In general, indoor acreage is four to six times more productive, in part because of the year-round growing season. Outdoors, you might get one crop [per year]; indoors, you might get four or five crops per year,”
Now, I might disagree about his use of the word “efficient” because it may not account for the imbued impute energy of a large hydroponic system not to mention large steel and concrete building. His emphasis on control is also a little unsettling too, simply because it was a disproportionate emphasis on control, instead of more flexible whole systems design based on relationships, that got us into the current food crisis mess in the first place. Now I wouldn’t throw out the idea of vertical farming entirely I just think there may be a better use of our energy and resources. Skyscrapers alone use ample amounts of energy in their construction let alone ones potentially holding complex hydroponics systems. Some of these designs incorporate aspects of passive and active solar, wind, housing, rainwater harvesting, methane digestion for energy, composting, aquaculture, and other generally cool features you would expect from the sustainably minded. But, here is what my friend Richard Register author of Ecocities: rebuilding cities in balance with nature had to say about it, “the notion of filling a building [with plants] and artificially supplying the light for the plants … from any kind of energy system is one of the weirdest ideas I’ve ever heard of. It’s not serious agriculture. It’s just not…. It’s an intellectual plaything.”
“A better answer is to develop, over time, more compact, energy-efficient cities along the European model, he says. That would free up land near urban areas for conventional agriculture with “100-percent-free solar energy” falling on it. Urban community gardens and high-intensity conventional commercial gardens could also supply part of the need.”
I echo Richards sentiments; it seems to me that before we consider growning food in farmscrapers in the future we should reclaim what is already available to us now. New York City alone has 1700 unused and vacant lots! If space is the issue well I’d rather get rid of some streets. Mo Town in Detroit is starting to turn into one large urban farm and should’t we encourage ideas from the bottom up, as in from the community, versus developers first. This doesn’t mean I think vertical farming is a absolute dead end. Like I said I still think that it is an idea with good merits but it needs to be more scalable and less impute intensive. If vertical farming becomes a euphemism for taking the industrialized petrol based monoculture outside and then reconfiguring that inside (which is what some designs looked like) then I say no way! Recently, one design called Sky Vegetables caught my eye. This design was developed by 22 year old Keith Agoada, a University of Wisconsin business student, and took home a 10000$ first place prize in a competition for creative start ups. Sky Vegetables is basically a big box remix with vegetables being grown on the grocery store roof (in greenhouses), complete with rainwater harvesting, solar panels, compost, oh and large unsightly asphalt parking lot too of course. I believe if you were to add affordable housing and office space to a idea like this, scale it down a bit, build most of the building with Glubam or with recycled wood, and of course take out the parking lot, well then I might sign on to vertical farming. Until then, when I hear the word vertical farming used I’m going to think of a forest garden.
Most permaculturalist agree that we must grow more food with in our cities, but does that mean inside the buildings of the city itself? Vertical farming has been making some big headlines lately and so I’ve decided to approach some of the latest ideas and innovations and examine them through the lens of permaculture principals. This idea has been around for a while (think terraces in Asia) and has some very strong merits. Bill Mollison remarked that “95 of the cost of food in a city like New York comes from it’s transportation, storage, and packaging.” Growing in a high density fashion has the potential to save ample land and resources if done correctly. But, as a permaculturalist I have some serious reservations about vertical farms. Most of the skyscraper type designs would grow food hydroponically This requires considerable energy and maintenance the trade off being a year long growing season; that is if your not dealing with constant “technical difficulties”. Dickson Despommier the leading proponent of the vertical farming idea had this say, “You can control nothing outdoors, and you can control everything indoors. That means no floods, wildfires, hailstorms, tornadoes, or droughts. Plant diseases and pests are more easily controlled, too, meaning less need for herbicides and pesticides.”
“And indoor agriculture is more efficient. One indoor acre of strawberries can produce as much as 30 outdoor acres can. In general, indoor acreage is four to six times more productive, in part because of the year-round growing season. Outdoors, you might get one crop [per year]; indoors, you might get four or five crops per year,”
Now, I might disagree about his use of the word “efficient” because it may not account for the imbued impute energy of a large hydroponic system not to mention large steel and concrete building. His emphasis on control is also a little unsettling too, simply because it was a disproportionate emphasis on control, instead of more flexible whole systems design based on relationships, that got us into the current food crisis mess in the first place. Now I wouldn’t throw out the idea of vertical farming entirely I just think there may be a better use of our energy and resources. Skyscrapers alone use ample amounts of energy in their construction let alone ones potentially holding complex hydroponics systems. Some of these designs incorporate aspects of passive and active solar, wind, housing, rainwater harvesting, methane digestion for energy, composting, aquaculture, and other generally cool features you would expect from the sustainably minded. But, here is what my friend Richard Register author of Ecocities: rebuilding cities in balance with nature had to say about it, “the notion of filling a building [with plants] and artificially supplying the light for the plants … from any kind of energy system is one of the weirdest ideas I’ve ever heard of. It’s not serious agriculture. It’s just not…. It’s an intellectual plaything.”
“A better answer is to develop, over time, more compact, energy-efficient cities along the European model, he says. That would free up land near urban areas for conventional agriculture with “100-percent-free solar energy” falling on it. Urban community gardens and high-intensity conventional commercial gardens could also supply part of the need.”
I echo Richards sentiments; it seems to me that before we consider growning food in farmscrapers in the future we should reclaim what is already available to us now. New York City alone has 1700 unused and vacant lots! If space is the issue well I’d rather get rid of some streets. Mo Town in Detroit is starting to turn into one large urban farm and should’t we encourage ideas from the bottom up, as in from the community, versus developers first. This doesn’t mean I think vertical farming is a absolute dead end. Like I said I still think that it is an idea with good merits but it needs to be more scalable and less impute intensive. If vertical farming becomes a euphemism for taking the industrialized petrol based monoculture outside and then reconfiguring that inside (which is what some designs looked like) then I say no way! Recently, one design called Sky Vegetables caught my eye. This design was developed by 22 year old Keith Agoada, a University of Wisconsin business student, and took home a 10000$ first place prize in a competition for creative start ups. Sky Vegetables is basically a big box remix with vegetables being grown on the grocery store roof (in greenhouses), complete with rainwater harvesting, solar panels, compost, oh and large unsightly asphalt parking lot too of course. I believe if you were to add affordable housing and office space to a idea like this, scale it down a bit, build most of the building with Glubam or with recycled wood, and of course take out the parking lot, well then I might sign on to vertical farming. Until then, when I hear the word vertical farming used I’m going to think of a forest garden.
Sunday, 31 May 2009
London faces new-build housing shortage
29 May, 2009
By Tom Bill
There is no oversupply of new-built apartments in the capital according to Savills
There is a looming shortage of new housing in London, according to property agent Savills.
Its latest study found only 916 units were empty and available in the capital in the first quarter of this year, dismissing recent reports the figure was as high as 10,000.
It said: “Tales of our cities being full of vast tracts of empty, newly built apartments for sale are misleading and commentators who think that an oversupply of new housing will depress the market and keep prices falling across the board are wrong.”
Its research for the first three months of the year show there are 29,000 units for sale and/or under construction. Of these, one-third have already been sold off-plan and another third are not yet for sale. The remaining 9,844 new units are mostly being sold off-plan and are not yet complete.
This leaves 916 units that Savills describes as “habitable and on completed schemes and can therefore be described as standing empty and available.”
Yolande Barnes, head of Savills Research, said: “A very conservative estimate is that, in the context of 2008 rates of new build sales, this represents a mere two months’ supply.”
She added: “When put into context of the number of units that people buy in London in a year, (the figures) point to a looming shortage rather than a looming glut of properties in many boroughs - although there are notable exceptions where a potential oversupply is an issue.”
By Tom Bill
There is no oversupply of new-built apartments in the capital according to Savills
There is a looming shortage of new housing in London, according to property agent Savills.
Its latest study found only 916 units were empty and available in the capital in the first quarter of this year, dismissing recent reports the figure was as high as 10,000.
It said: “Tales of our cities being full of vast tracts of empty, newly built apartments for sale are misleading and commentators who think that an oversupply of new housing will depress the market and keep prices falling across the board are wrong.”
Its research for the first three months of the year show there are 29,000 units for sale and/or under construction. Of these, one-third have already been sold off-plan and another third are not yet for sale. The remaining 9,844 new units are mostly being sold off-plan and are not yet complete.
This leaves 916 units that Savills describes as “habitable and on completed schemes and can therefore be described as standing empty and available.”
Yolande Barnes, head of Savills Research, said: “A very conservative estimate is that, in the context of 2008 rates of new build sales, this represents a mere two months’ supply.”
She added: “When put into context of the number of units that people buy in London in a year, (the figures) point to a looming shortage rather than a looming glut of properties in many boroughs - although there are notable exceptions where a potential oversupply is an issue.”
Sunday, 24 May 2009
BEDZED - DESIGN PRINCIPLES
* Zero energy—The project is designed to use only energy from renewable sources generated on site. There are 777 m² of solar panels. Tree waste fuels the development's cogeneration plant (downdraft gasifier) to provide district heating and electricity. The gasifier is not being used, because of technical implementation problems, though the technology has been and is being used successfully at other sites.
* High quality—The apartments are finished to a high standard to attract the urban professional.
* Energy efficient—The houses face south to take advantage of solar gain, are triple glazed, and have high thermal insulation.
* Water efficient—Most rain water falling on the site is collected and reused. Appliances are chosen to be water-efficient and use recycled water when possible. A "Living Machine" system of recycling waste water was installed, but is not operating.
* Low-impact materials—Building materials were selected from renewable or recycled sources within 35 miles of the site, to minimize the energy required for transportation.
* Waste recycling—Refuse-collection facilities are designed to support recycling.
* Transport—The development works in partnership with the United Kingdom's leading car-sharing operator, City Car Club. Residents are encouraged to use this environmentally friendly alternative to car ownership; an on-site selection of vehicles is available for use.
* Encourage eco-friendly transport—Electric and liquefied-petroleum-gas cars have priority over cars that burn petrol and diesel, and electricity is provided in parking spaces for charging electric cars.
* High quality—The apartments are finished to a high standard to attract the urban professional.
* Energy efficient—The houses face south to take advantage of solar gain, are triple glazed, and have high thermal insulation.
* Water efficient—Most rain water falling on the site is collected and reused. Appliances are chosen to be water-efficient and use recycled water when possible. A "Living Machine" system of recycling waste water was installed, but is not operating.
* Low-impact materials—Building materials were selected from renewable or recycled sources within 35 miles of the site, to minimize the energy required for transportation.
* Waste recycling—Refuse-collection facilities are designed to support recycling.
* Transport—The development works in partnership with the United Kingdom's leading car-sharing operator, City Car Club. Residents are encouraged to use this environmentally friendly alternative to car ownership; an on-site selection of vehicles is available for use.
* Encourage eco-friendly transport—Electric and liquefied-petroleum-gas cars have priority over cars that burn petrol and diesel, and electricity is provided in parking spaces for charging electric cars.
Bill Dunster's walls
Bill Dunster is, for want of a better word, an ecotect. That is an architect with a passion for green design. He sprang to fame with a project known as BedZed, a development of live-work units built on a disused sewage farm in Beddington, South London. It’s had acres of publicity and is rightly held up as an exemplar of how multiple housing units should be built in the future. But BedZed has now been finished for three years and Dunster has found it a hard act to follow. Developers and social housing landlords have not been falling over each other to repeat “the experiment” and he has been frustrated by planners who haven’t been prepared to loosen the planning corset just because a scheme is green.
But at last, Dunster has another scheme to showcase his talent. This time it’s a four-storey block of key worker flats on the St Matthews council estate in Lambeth, South London. It’s not quite as big or prestigious as BedZed but in some ways it’s more technically advanced. Building carried a feature on it this week, which caught my eye: in particular, the wall detailing. The outer walls are no less than 550mm wide, compared with just under 300mm in conventional housing. They are made up of 150mm blockwork inside 300mm of expanded polystyrene insulation filling the cavity, behind a 100mm brick skin, which is what them outside world sees. The plus point is of course that, with this much insulation, you have got a tremendously low U value – reckoned to be just 0.1W/K/m2. But against this, on a 60m2 apartment, you are loosing up to 25% of the footprint to walling.
Yikes. That’s a hell of a lot, especially considering we are being encouraged to build smaller and smaller units. Dunster is a big fan of heavy mass construction, which means little or no timber frame and little or no off-site pre-fabrication. He believes in the importance of thermal mass (concrete in other words) in regulating the temperature characteristics of a home and in reducing the effects of summer over-heating. But is thermal mass really such a wonderful concept that you have to loose 20% or more of your floor area just to accommodate it? If there wasn’t quite so much south-facing glazing — another of his betes verts — then perhaps the designs wouldn’t require quite so much thermal mass and the walls wouldn't have to be quite so thick.
Another problem comes with the adoption of a 300mm cavity, shown here in diagramatic form, (ref Building magazine). How do you manage the openings? In particular, how do you ensure that the water penetrating the outer brickwork is directed back out of the external wall rather than dripping down into the joinery? You’ve left the world of conventional construction far behind here: there are no off-the-peg wall ties this long and there are no pre-formed cavity trays this wide. Dunster’s solution has been to design a wrap-around cavity tray around each window. To me, it sounds just like the sort of detail which is likely to fall victim to sloppiness on site. Done perfectly, there should never be any problem but construction isn’t a perfect world.
One other feature of this article stands out. The costings. £1600/m2. This isn’t, in fact, far out of line with many other innovative social housing projects being built around the country at the moment, but it’s about twice the rate that selfbuilders hope to complete their projects for. Why the huge discrepancy? A good question, which will have to wait for another blog.
Labels: Insulation, Low Energy Homes
But at last, Dunster has another scheme to showcase his talent. This time it’s a four-storey block of key worker flats on the St Matthews council estate in Lambeth, South London. It’s not quite as big or prestigious as BedZed but in some ways it’s more technically advanced. Building carried a feature on it this week, which caught my eye: in particular, the wall detailing. The outer walls are no less than 550mm wide, compared with just under 300mm in conventional housing. They are made up of 150mm blockwork inside 300mm of expanded polystyrene insulation filling the cavity, behind a 100mm brick skin, which is what them outside world sees. The plus point is of course that, with this much insulation, you have got a tremendously low U value – reckoned to be just 0.1W/K/m2. But against this, on a 60m2 apartment, you are loosing up to 25% of the footprint to walling.
Yikes. That’s a hell of a lot, especially considering we are being encouraged to build smaller and smaller units. Dunster is a big fan of heavy mass construction, which means little or no timber frame and little or no off-site pre-fabrication. He believes in the importance of thermal mass (concrete in other words) in regulating the temperature characteristics of a home and in reducing the effects of summer over-heating. But is thermal mass really such a wonderful concept that you have to loose 20% or more of your floor area just to accommodate it? If there wasn’t quite so much south-facing glazing — another of his betes verts — then perhaps the designs wouldn’t require quite so much thermal mass and the walls wouldn't have to be quite so thick.
Another problem comes with the adoption of a 300mm cavity, shown here in diagramatic form, (ref Building magazine). How do you manage the openings? In particular, how do you ensure that the water penetrating the outer brickwork is directed back out of the external wall rather than dripping down into the joinery? You’ve left the world of conventional construction far behind here: there are no off-the-peg wall ties this long and there are no pre-formed cavity trays this wide. Dunster’s solution has been to design a wrap-around cavity tray around each window. To me, it sounds just like the sort of detail which is likely to fall victim to sloppiness on site. Done perfectly, there should never be any problem but construction isn’t a perfect world.
One other feature of this article stands out. The costings. £1600/m2. This isn’t, in fact, far out of line with many other innovative social housing projects being built around the country at the moment, but it’s about twice the rate that selfbuilders hope to complete their projects for. Why the huge discrepancy? A good question, which will have to wait for another blog.
Labels: Insulation, Low Energy Homes
Wednesday, 20 May 2009
harvest green project-02, vancouver
Romses Architects has designed “Harvest Green Project-02′ as a part of Vancouver ‘The 2030 Challenge’. Harvest Green Project is rooted in a concept that challenges the status quo of how energy and food is produced, delivered and sustained in our city, neighbourhoods, and individual single-family homes.
Taking cues from the citys eco-density charter, and in particular, it’s new laneway housing initiatives, the Harvest Green Project proposes to overlay a new ‘green energy and food web’ across the numerous residential neighborhoods and laneways within the city as these communities address future increased densification. The city’s laneways will be transformed into green energy and food conduits, or ‘green streets’, where energy and food is ‘harvested’ via proposed micro laneway live-work homes.
Saturday, 16 May 2009
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