“Eco Urban Agriculture”— Design for distributed and networked urban farming in Shanghai.

Posted on | August 23, 2012 | No Comments

This past June, Susan Evans, GoodtoChina’s Founder/CEO traveled to Helsinki to present our research at the Cumulus Conference: Northern World Mandate.

The paper the presented introduces an innovative sustainable design project: “Eco Urban Agriculture”— Design for distributed and networked urban farming in Shanghai.

The goal of this project is to support a paradigm shift in the food model from rural, disconnected and monoculture to an urban, connected and distributed model and to do this by creating prototypes of sustainable, urban farming systems.

Key to this development is to determine the functional characteristics and networked associations that contribute to the success of an urban farm. A systems approach is used, a design toolbox and an iterative development process is applied to evaluate the network and its impact on the model.

Importantly, during this prototyping stage, the immediate environment and social fabric will underlie the formation and type of urban farm network that can be created. Local resources will be used to integrate the urban farm into the local social and business network.

Stakeholders in the development of these new models are inter-dependent, local and include those such as government, business, design, architecture and education.

The paper can be read in full here.

To conclude the paper summarizes the methodology used in this project and explores how the learning’s can contribute to design development of scalable eco urban agriculture models.