Urban Framing Depot

BY: ADMIN | JUNE - 10 - 2024

2024 Skyscraper Competition
Honorable Mention

Yifan Shen, Yue Zhuo, Xiong Fei
United States

The Urban Farming Depot is conceptualized as a radical apparatus for food production and an urban monument. Through provocatively choreographing the food system and public activities between existing skyscrapers in cities, the project attempts to address urban food insecurity in metropolises around the world, using London as a testing site.

The existing food system in London is characterized by long-distance, carbon-heavy transportation. 99% of the food is imported from outside the city boundary, perpetuating excessive carbon emissions and unequal access to fresh and healthy food in the city. Currently, food is harvested in the countryside, processed in the suburbs, transported to wholesale markets by train, trucks, and planes, and distributed to local supermarkets or restaurants. A fundamental way for London to diversify its food source is urban farming. The farming depot collapses the whole food production process from a territorial scale to available urban sites as porous facade additions. Using vertical farming, we turn an abandoned site into a food production machine to make urban farms a considerable food source. The form is optimized to maximize the growing area. Sowing, growing, harvesting, retailing, and composting are all integrated into the megastructure.

The Urban Farming Depot reimagines the urban population’s relation to agricultural practice and land for production by its imposing scale and efficiency. The Farming Depot mobilizes every citizen to become a “farmer” in their leisure time through digital tools and generous physical public planting space. With the additional farming area, each household in the city can instantly receive 10 square meters of planting space to supplement their fresh food diet. People across the city are encouraged to apply for membership to be part of the farming collective. Spatially, the sectional diagram of the megastructure is radically simple. The growing valley, with massive depot shelves delineating its boundary, forms the monumental sacred space in the center. At the bottom of the valley is the area for human interaction with the plants. Behind the planting shelves are machines for processing food and composting.

With the high capacity of the farming depot structure and the monumental form, the site becomes a landmark and a social condenser, attracting citizens and tourists across the city. Farming becomes a mass recreation activity alongside visiting art galleries, museums, and theaters.

The public’s relationship to farming practices in this proposal is virtual and physical. Contrary to the low-tech approach of conventional allotments, members of the farming collectives can manage their farming modules on a mobile phone app. We designed multiple farming modules catering to different types of vegetables suitable for London, and users can select their planting combinations online. The planting modules are not bound to the depot shelves but can be moved around with cranes and conveyors. Members of the farming collective and the general public can schedule a farming appointment or spontaneously visit the farm to engage physically with their planting modules in the farming gallery and the market space at the bottom of the valley. Cranes will deliver the requested planting modules to the users for them to sow, water, and harvest.

The Urban Farming Depot is not just a benevolent and utopian solution but an opportunity to radically reimagine the productive method for food, a basic necessity for human survival, in the context of technological advancements in the third decade of the 21st century. It challenges the status quo, propelling us towards a future where urban agriculture is not only possible but integral to our cities’ fabric and inhabitants’ well-being.