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Garden City Brings A Breath of Fresh Air To Urban Paris
The project, Garden City of the Crescent Moon, seeks to showcase what the design of the future can look like. How can environmentally-friendly concerns be integrated into urban design? Garden City seeks to provide the answers to that question.
By KC Morgan
August 6, 2021
The project, Garden City of the Crescent Moon, seeks to showcase what the design of the future can look like. How can environmentally-friendly concerns be integrated into urban design? Garden City seeks to provide the answers to that question.
Urban agriculture is a big part of the design. This is a method of using space to create growing areas for herbs, spices and vegetables. Urban agriculture not only improves soil quality but also reduces air pollution. Most importantly of all, it produces food.
By providing spaces for farming and gardening within urban areas, the plan also provides opportunities for economic benefits. Produce, spices and other products harvested from these mini urban farms can become a source of supplemental income. Roof terraces and small urban greenhouses create space for urban agriculture and create a unique look.
The design also includes spaces for housing, offices, sports facilities and areas for cultural activities. The distinct silhouette of the project overall is made to resemble the shape of canyons. The Garden City design follows the natural bend of the Lac des Minimes and its natural islands.
In the Garden City, all yards, roofs and public spaces will be used for growing and livestock. In fact, cattle breeding and dairy production areas will be right in town at the heart of the action. Meanwhile, everyone will have the chance and the space to grow all sorts of commodities, including corn, beans and herbs.
This design shows how urban environments can become more eco-friendly and self-sustaining in the future. How can urban agriculture spaces like this impact society, climate and health? This project can serve as a case study to help answer these questions. The plan is a design created by architecture firm Rescubika. The firm describes Garden City as “created by man for man” and says it will improve the urban landscape by “adapting it to our new way of living in the city.”
Via DesignBoom
Images via RESCUBIKA Creations
In Paris, The Pandemic Gave A Boost To Urban Farms
Nature Urbaine’s initial plan was to sell produce to restaurants and local businesses in the surrounding area. When France imposed stay-at-home orders, those restaurants and cafés closed overnight. But lettuce and tomatoes don’t stop growing during a global pandemic
The largest urban rooftop farm in Europe opened its doors to the public at the beginning of July – two months behind schedule. Stretching the length of two football fields, Nature Urbaine sits on top of a convention centre in the south-west corner of Paris. The farm began growing herbs, fruit, and vegetables just weeks before Covid-19 hit Europe.
Nature Urbaine’s initial plan was to sell produce to restaurants and local businesses in the surrounding area. When France imposed stay-at-home orders, those restaurants and cafés closed overnight. But lettuce and tomatoes don’t stop growing during a global pandemic.
“We had to rethink our entire model, just as we were having our first harvest,” says Sophie Hardy, the farm’s site manager.
The farm began instead to sell directly to consumers. The small team of farmers were the only people allowed on the rooftop during the lockdown, and every morning they would harvest fruit and vegetables grown from seeds sown in March. They sold the resulting food baskets to residents in front of the 15th arrondissement’s town hall the same day.
For Hardy, the pandemic actually helped urban farms to find a new relevance.
“The crisis marked a moment when people living in the city wanted to opt for healthy, quality products found locally,” she explains. “There was a boom in producers selling their produce directly, and a new awareness that local producers were in danger – and, in echo of that, that France’s own position as a leader in the food industry was in danger”.
This fact did not go unnoticed by the French government. President Emmanuel Macron said in a speech on 12 March that delegating the nation’s food supply to other countries was “madness” and called to “take back control”.
As Covid-19 spread across Europe that month, European countries re-erected invisible internal borders, slowing down or even halting entirely cross-border food supply chains. Storage vehicles piled up at borders and seasonal farmworkers, hunkered down in lockdown, couldn’t get to fruit-picking jobs. Some lorry drivers refused to drive across a continent in the grip of a pandemic.
Fearing seeing fruit and vegetables rot in the fields, the government told businesses and consumers to focus on stocking and buying French food products.
In Paris, where residents weren’t allowed to go further than 1km from their homes, some local producers thrived.
Paris’s Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo has long championed urban agriculture. In 2016, Paris’s city hall unveiled Parisculteurs, a call for ecological and agricultural projects that would receive start-up money. Since then, the platform has funded 38 new urban farms, which produce 800 tonnes of fruit and vegetables every year.
One of Hidalgo’s principle ideas in her recent, successful re-election campaign was the idea of the '15-minute city', a way to rethink urban proximity. The concept aims to turn one of Paris’s drawbacks, its density, into its strength: residents should be able to access every conceivable service within 15 minutes of their homes, from health centres to bars, restaurants, and schools. The city wants to make everything more accessible – including locally grown produce.
La Caverne is one local producer that saw a financial benefit from the lockdown. On the other side of the city from Nature Urbaine and ten metres underground, mushrooms and endives flourish in a former car park that has been transformed into an urban farm.
“For the first time people realised the value of local agriculture,” explains La Caverne’s co-founder Jean-Noël Gertz. “Local producers were able to sell their products at a fair price. They didn’t have a problem finding places that would sell their products, nor did they have to compete with tomatoes from Morocco”.
Although the Covid-19 crisis didn’t entirely rupture traditional supply chains, urban agriculture professionals are hoping that the last few months have proved the importance of a diversified local food supply.
“Urban farms are an essential way of rethinking the cities of tomorrow,” says Anouck Barcat, the president of the French Association of Professional Urban Agriculture (AFAUP). “It’s one of the tools to make a city more resilient. They have so many benefits – we don’t make monofunctional farms”.
There are a number of environmental advantages to urban farms, not least of all their carbon footprint. An urban farm can sell fresh strawberries just metres from where they were grown, rather than having them travel hundreds of miles in a refrigerated container.
Another advantage of urban agriculture is its flexibility: it can slot into the negative spaces of the city, like abandoned railways, empty metro stations and even up the sides of buildings.
“We don’t need to be Haussman,” Barcat jokes, referencing Paris’s most notorious urban planner, who sliced up the city in the 19th century to create its wide avenues and tree-lined boulevards. “We’re not cutting through the city to make way for farms. They can go wherever there’s space: on roofs, in polluted areas, in car parks. We already have the solution for these spaces.”
One criticism levelled at urban farms is that the small yields don’t justify their expense. But both Barcat and Hardy are keen to insist that urban farms should not compete with nor try to replace traditional rural agriculture, but exist in parallel with it.
“We can’t cultivate every type of crop, and anyway, we’re not able to produce enough to feed the entire city. But the crisis has shown that urban agriculture has its place in the city and that this model works,” says Hardy.
France began to ease its lockdown on 11 May. Paris’s restaurants and cafés have reopened, and the city’s open-air street markets are once again selling peaches from Portugal and strawberries from Belgium. The farmers at Nature Urbaine now only have to walk a few metres to deliver their produce to Le Perchoir, the chic cocktail bar and restaurant sharing the same rooftop.
Barcat is philosophical about the slow rise of urban farms, but says that France’s capital has already seen a shift in thinking.
“Of course, some people will go back to their old habits. But others won’t. [The pandemic] has opened up new possibilities. My hope is that the ordinary Parisian will start to introduce more food grown locally in their consumption habits. We’re not going back to zero.”
Catherine Bennett is a journalist based in Paris.
Lead Photo: The largest urban farm in Europe, Nature Urbaine, had to pivot its model due to the coronavirus pandemic. (Stephane de Sakutin/AFP via Getty Images)
Europe's Largest Rooftop Farm Gets Growing Again After Paris Lockdown
On the top of a major exhibition complex in the south of Paris is a farm with a difference. The Nature Urbaine project is the largest of its type in Europe. Extending over 14,000 square meters, the project is aiming to become a model for sustainable production
13-Jul-2020
Ross Cullen in Paris
On the top of a major exhibition complex in the south of Paris is a farm with a difference.
The Nature Urbaine project is the largest of its type in Europe.
Extending over 14,000 square meters, the project is aiming to become a model for sustainable production.
The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted many aspects of daily life and Paris authorities are hoping to make a permanent shift to more fruit and vegetable production sites in the heart of the city.
The city-farm project on the rooftop provides a chance for people to rent spaces to produce their own fruit and vegetables.
Our project is based on the genuine willingness to put some sense back to the city
- Sophie Hardy, director of the Urbaine project, wants to bring nature back to Paris
The Paris authorities are trying to grow greener models of sustainability through projects like this.
"Our project is based on the genuine willingness to put some sense back to the city, to support its resilience," Sophie Hardy, the director of Nature Urbaine, told CGTN Europe.
"Also to imagine how it could be more virtuous and how we can bring nature back in a city that pushed nature away for so many years."
Read more: COVID-19 and the city: The future of pandemic-proofed buildings
But a farm in a city runs the risk of plant growth being affected by the toxic fumes of road traffic.
Emissions of nitrogen dioxide have more than doubled in the French capital since the end of lockdown in mid-May.
Camille Billiemaz, a vegetable production manager at Nature Urbaine, told CGTN Europe that "with some plants, where the root system is protected, the plant doesn't absorb the pollution."
The Nature Urbaine Project is the largest of its kind in Europe and aims to become a model for sustainable production. /CGTN
"As for the produce grown in the water system, we check that pollution stays low," she says.
"We still advise people to wash the vegetables before eating it, but we conform to pollution thresholds."
During lockdown, this urban farm had an agreement with the local authority to deliver vegetable baskets to online customers.
And while the rooftop may not yet be crowded with amateur farmers, there is an enthusiasm for local shopping at the heart of French cuisine.
The creators of the project want Parisians to change their consumer habits and grow their own fruit and vegetables on rented plots. /CGTN
Weekly markets are a tradition across France, with many people still preferring to shop there rather than at big chain stores.
The sense of community at Nature Urbaine is a positive aspect.
But there are economic and cultural challenges for projects like this, says Frederic Madre, a biodiversity researcher.
"Urban farms are quite expensive to build, so local communities are not really able to pay for it.
"There are also problems linked to the fact that the majority of the population is disconnected from nature. And you can't respect what you don't know. But we hope people will change their consumer habits."
The Future of Food: Inside The World's Largest Urban Farm – Built on a Rooftop
On top of a striking new exhibition hall in the southern 15th arrondissement of Paris, the world’s largest urban rooftop farm has started to bear fruit. Strawberries, to be precise: small, intensely flavoured and resplendently red
In Paris, urban farmers are trying a soil-free approach to agriculture that uses less space and fewer resources. Could it help cities face the threats to our food supplies?
Urban farming on a Parisian rooftop. Photograph: Stéphane de Sakutin/AFP/Getty Images
08 Jul 2020
On top of a striking new exhibition hall in the southern 15th arrondissement of Paris, the world’s largest urban rooftop farm has started to bear fruit. Strawberries, to be precise: small, intensely flavoured and resplendently red.
They sprout abundantly from cream-coloured plastic columns. Pluck one out to peer inside and you see the columns are completely hollow, the roots of dozens of strawberry plants dangling into thin air.
From identical vertical columns nearby burst row upon row of lettuces; near those are aromatic basil, sage, and peppermint. Opposite, in narrow, horizontal trays packed not with soil but coco coir (coconut fibre), grow heirloom and cherry tomatoes, shiny aubergines, and brightly coloured chards.
“It is,” says Pascal Hardy, surveying his domain, “a clean, productive and sustainable model of agriculture that can in time make a real contribution to the resilience – social, economic and also environmental – of the kind of big cities where most of humanity now lives.
And look: it really works.”Hardy, an engineer, and sustainable development consultant, began experimenting with vertical farming and aeroponic growing towers – as those soil-free plastic columns are known – on his Paris apartment block roof five years ago.
This space is somewhat bigger: 14,000 sq metres, the size (almost exactly) of two football pitches. Coronavirus delayed its opening by a couple of months, but Nature Urbaine, as the operation is called, is now up and running, and has planted roughly a third of the available space.
Already, the team of young urban farmers who tend it have picked, in one day, 3,000 lettuces and 150 punnets of strawberries. When the remaining two-thirds of the vast rooftop of Paris Expo’s Pavillon 6 are in production, 20 staff will harvest up to 1,000kg of perhaps 35 different varieties of fruit and vegetables, every day.“
We’re not ever, obviously, going to feed the whole city this way,” cautions Hardy. “In the urban environment you’re working with very significant practical constraints, clearly, on what you can do and where. But if enough unused space – rooftops, walls, small patches of land – can be developed like this, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t eventually target maybe between 5% and 10% of consumption.”
Nature Urbaine is already supplying local residents, who can order fruit and veg boxes online; a clutch of nearby hotels; a private catering firm that operates 30 company canteens in and around Paris; and an airy bar and restaurant, Le Perchoir, which occupies one extremity of the Pavillon 6 rooftop.
Nature Urbaine. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian
Perhaps most significantly, however, this is a real-life showcase for the work of Hardy’s flourishing urban agriculture consultancy, Agripolis, which is currently fielding inquiries from around the world – including in the UK, the US, and Germany – to design, build and equip a new breed of soil-free inner-city farm.“The method’s advantages are many,” he says. “First, I don’t know about you, but I don’t much like the fact that most of the fruit and vegetables we eat have been treated with something like 17 different pesticides, or that the intensive farming techniques that produced them are such huge generators of greenhouse gases.“I don’t much like the fact, either, that they’ve travelled an average of 2,000 refrigerated kilometres to my plate, that their quality is so poor, because the varieties are selected for their capacity to withstand that journey, or that 80% of the price I pay goes to wholesalers and transport companies, not the producers.”
Produce grown using this soil-free method, on the other hand – which relies solely on a small quantity of water, enriched with organic nutrients, minerals and bacteria, pumped around a closed circuit of pipes, towers and trays – is “produced up here, and sold locally, just down there. It barely travels at all,” Hardy says.“It uses less space. An ordinary intensive farm can grow nine salads per square metre of soil; I can grow 50 in a single tower. You can select crop varieties for their flavour, not their resistance to the transport and storage chain, and you can pick them when they’re really at their best, and not before.”
No pesticides or fungicides are needed, no soil is exhausted, and the water that gently showers the plants’ roots every 12 minutes is recycled, so the method uses 90% less water than a classic intensive farm for the same yield. The whole automated process can be monitored and controlled, on site or remotely, with a tablet computer.
Urban farming is not, of course, a new phenomenon. The mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, aims eventually to have at least 100 hectares of rooftops, walls and facades covered with greenery – including 30 hectares producing fruit and vegetables.
A programme called Les Parisculteurs invites local groups to come up with suitable projects for up to a dozen new sites every year.Inner-city agriculture is booming from Shanghai to Detroit and Tokyo to Bangkok. Strawberries are being grown in disused shipping containers; mushrooms in underground carparks. Not all techniques, however, are environmentally friendly: ultra-intensive, 10-storey indoor farms that have sprung up in the US rely on banks of LED lighting and are major consumers of energy, Hardy says.
Aeroponic farming, he says, is “virtuous”. The equipment weighs little, can be installed on almost any flat surface, and is cheap to buy: roughly €100 to €150 per sq metre. It is cheap to run, too, consuming a tiny fraction of the electricity used by some techniques.
Aeroponic farming is ‘virtuous’, says Pascal Hardy. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian
Produce grown this way typically sells at prices that, while generally higher than those of classic intensive agriculture, are lower than soil-based organic growers. In Paris, Nature Urbaine should break even, Hardy estimates, some time next year – a few months later than planned because of the pandemic
.There are limits to what farmers can grow this way, of course, and much of the produce is suited to the summer months. “Root vegetables we cannot do, at least not yet,” he says. “Radishes are OK, but carrots, potatoes, that kind of thing – the roots are simply too long. Fruit trees are obviously not an option. And beans tend to take up a lot of space for not much return.”
But Agripolis runs a smaller test farm, on top of a gym and swimming pool complex in the 11th arrondissement, where it experiments with new varieties and trials new techniques. A couple of promising varieties of raspberries are soon to make the transition to commercial production.
Urban agriculture is not the only development changing the face of farming. As with almost every other sector of the economy, digitisation and new technologies are transforming the way we grow food.
Artificial intelligence (AI) and the internet of things are beginning to revolutionise farming, from driverless, fully automated farm machinery that can sow seeds and fertilise and water soil with maximum precision to systems that monitor exactly how healthy individual animals are and how much they are producing (a concept known as the “connected cow”).
Other AI systems analyse satellite and remote ground sensor data, for example, to monitor plant health, soil condition, temperature and humidity and even to spot potential crop diseases.
Drones, too, have multiple potential uses on farms. With the world’s bee population in steep decline due to global heating, pesticides, and other factors, drones are increasingly being used to pollinate crops fields and fruit orchards. To avoid wasting pollen by wafting it randomly at crops, or the damage to individual flowers caused by drones rubbing against them, scientists in Japan have developed a system in which a drone uses what can only be described as a bubble gun to blow balls of specially formulated liquid containing pollen at individual blossoms.
With global food production estimated to need to increase by as much as 70% over the coming decades, many scientists believe genetic editing, which has already been used to create crops that produce higher yields or need less water to grow, will also have to play a bigger role.
The technique could help build plant and animal resistance to disease, and reduce waste. For example, with methane known to be a stronger greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, research is under way into the stomach bacteria of cows in the hope that tweaking animals’ gut microbes may eventually allow them to produce not just more meat, but also less gas.
Seating at Le Perchoir. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian
Urban farming of the kind being practised in Paris is one part of a bigger and fast-changing picture. “Here, we’re really talking about about building resilience, on several levels – a word whose meaning I have come to understand personally,” says Hardy, pointing to the wheelchair he has been forced to use since being injured by a falling tree.
“That resilience can be economic: urban farming, hyper-local food production, can plainly provide a measure of relief in an economic crisis. But it is also environmental: boosting the amount of vegetation in our cities will help combat some of the effects of global heating, particularly urban ‘heat islands’.”
Done respectfully, and over time, inner-city agriculture can prompt us to think differently both about cities, by breaking down their traditional geography of different zones for working, living and playing, and about agriculture, by bringing food production closer into our lives. “It’s changing paradigms,” says Hardy.
Farms of The Future: The Paris Rooftops At The Heart of an Urban Revolution
A bumblebee zig-zags through rows of lettuce, over a healthy patch of red peppers and lingers next to a juicy strawberry, before buzzing away and off the rooftop of a six-story building in central Paris. Based on the top floor of a municipal swimming pool in the busy Marais district, this thriving city farm is at the heart of an urban food revolution in the French capital
Words by Peter Yeung
June 3, 2020
The world's largest urban farm is opening in the French capital and will soon produce around 1,000kg of organic produce every day
A bumblebee zig-zags through rows of lettuce, over a healthy patch of red peppers and lingers next to a juicy strawberry, before buzzing away and off the rooftop of a six-story building in central Paris.
Based on the top floor of a municipal swimming pool in the busy Marais district, this thriving city farm is at the heart of an urban food revolution in the French capital.
Opened in 2017 by Agripolis, it is part of a series of City Hall-led projects, called Parisculteurs, which will see 100 hectares of vegetation planted across Paris by the end of the year. Agripolis alone has 10 farms running or in planning around the city.
The farm’s vertical system is closed-loop, doesn’t waste any water, and doesn’t use pesticides. In season, it produces some 20-30,000 portions of fruit, salad, and vegetables. It has come to be a blueprint for changing how the city eats.
“We don’t throw anything away,” says Pascal Hardy, an agronomist and the founder of Agripolis, who only entered the world of urban farming in 2015 by growing vegetables on the roof of his Parisian apartment.
“My principal motivation has always been environmental. Our farms are great for biodiversity and efficiency, and they have a very low carbon footprint.”
Agripolis is also set to unveil a 14,000sq m farm atop the Paris Expo Porte de Versailles, an exhibition center in the south-west of the city. The project was due to open in April but this had to be delayed because of the lockdown in France in response to the pandemic. When it opens at the end of June, it will be the largest urban rooftop farm in the world – and the largest urban farm of any kind in Europe. With more than 30 different plant species, the Porte de Versailles site will produce around 1,000kg of goods every day in high season. The first harvest of greens is expected after a month.
Visitors will be able to eat at a 300-cover on-site restaurant, attend educational tours and even lease small vegetable plots of their own. The all-organic produce, cultivated by around 20 gardeners, will be grown using aeroponic vertical farming methods.
We don’t throw anything away
“Our produce will be available across the whole of the city in a variety of shops, restaurants, and schemes,” adds Hardy.
There’s evidence that Hardy’s urban farms will be a success. “We’ve had a huge demand for their products, with customers asking specifically for Agripolis produce,” says Jeremy, an assistant at a nearby shop that has been stocking food from the Marais farm for six months. “We just need to cross the road to get the products.”
For now, Hardy’s main challenge is reducing the relatively premium cost of city-grown food, although advances in technology mean it continues to become cheaper. Coupled with low emissions and almost no “food miles”, the few extra cents could be a small price to pay.
Main image: Agripolis