EcoLiving Solutions

Leon Neilhouse of the Dirigo Earth Intistute (DEI) is preparing to submit an application to the Bucky Fuller Institute Challenge which is focused on helping develop innovative world changing appropriate technologies. I have agreed to work with to help put together his proposal for DEI. I agreed to work with him on this project while still leaving the option of open of putting together an alternative proposal more based on my vision of the application of the concepts of synergy (a term coined by Bucky Fuller) at the community scale level.

DEI’s plan is to set up a three story vertical farm based on a movement rapidly growing in scope and influence all over the globe – bio-integrated farming. While similar in many aspect to the rural integrated farming approaches put forward in developing countries by people like George Chan through his work at ZERI the Vertical Farm model is more similar to the approach developed by John Todd through his pioneering work via Ocean Arks. According to the Vertical Farm site:

Farming indoors is not a new concept, per se, as greenhouse-based agriculture has been in existence for some time. Numerous commercially viable crops (e.g., strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, herbs, and spices) have seen their way to the world’s supermarkets in ever increasing amounts over the last 15 years. Most of these operations are small when compared to factory farms, but unlike their outdoor counterparts, these facilities can produce crops year-round. Japan, Scandinavia, New Zealand, the United States, and Canada have thriving greenhouse industries. As far as is known, none have been constructed as multi-story buildings. Other food items that have been commercialized by indoor farming include freshwater fishes (e.g., tilapia, trout, stripped bass), and a wide variety of crustaceans and mollusks (e.g., shrimp, crayfish, mussels).

What is proposed here that differs radically from what now exists is to scale up the concept of indoor farming, in which a wide variety of produce is harvested in quantity enough to sustain even the largest of cities without significantly relying on resources beyond the city limits. Cattle, horses, sheep, goats, and other large farm animals seem to fall well outside the paradigm of urban farming. However, raising a wide variety of fowl and pigs are well within the capabilities of indoor farming. It has been estimated that it will require approximately 300 square feet of intensively farmed indoor space to produce enough food to support a single individual living in an extraterrestrial environment (e.g., on a space station or a colony on the moon or Mars)(35). Working within the framework of these calculations, one vertical farm with an architectural footprint of one square city block and rising up to 30 stories (approximately 3 million square feet) could provide enough nutrition (2,000 calories/day/person) to comfortably accommodate the needs of 10,000 people employing technologies currently available. Constructing the ideal vertical farm with a far greater yield per square foot will require additional research in many areas – hydrobiology, engineering, industrial microbiology, plant and animal genetics, architecture and design, public health, waste management, physics, and urban planning, to name but a few. The vertical farm is a theoretical construct whose time has arrived, for to fail to produce them in quantity for the world at-large in the near future will surely exacerbate the race for the limited amount of remaining natural resources of an already stressed out planet, creating an intolerable social climate.

So the major rationale for the concept of the urban integrated farm is the idea that it is not realistic to depopulate the urban areas as a significant number of people have acclimated themselves to the city lifestyles. Additionally a massive reverse of the urban migration pattern may not even solve the problem as the issue is too many people consuming too much too far away from the means of primary production. What urban agriculture offers is a way to take agriculture into the space age and do so without sacrificing the ecology or human health while providing important research insights into living in inhospitable environments that might eventually pave the way for sustainably colonizing what now are inhospitable environments for humans without the need for resupply which is of course a real concern for space travel.

The general idea is to start at a very basic level: a fully contained community center designed to hold 300, along with homes for a nominal population of 100. DEI envisions such a system being launched on a barge capable of being volume produced. The goal would be to provide affordable housing in a sustainable living format that minimizes the carbon dioxide and overall ecological footprint of the homeowners. This floating community design can be adapted easily for land use through some combination of a condominium and single family homes clustered around the farm/community center complex. While I think the idea of a floating city is a novel one I think we should first develop the concept on land where the conditions are not so challenging. Although possibly the novelty of the floating city concept would gather a lot of attention.

Fuller is famous for the idea of covering all of Manhattan with a large dome. The idea was that it could save a huge amount of energy. However the practicality of such a design is questionable even now. This design says Leon is a reduction of Fuller’s Triton City and an enlargement of the barge of New York Sun Works. It falls well within the proven design parameters of the naval architect and marine engineering profession.

Fuller was never able to get his Triton City funded, perhaps and Leon thinks this was because he was targeting the low end of the housing market. I however think that it was the general impracticality of Fuller’s designs that led to him being seen as more of a pie in the sky visionary than a practical implementer of technologies. Thus in my view this contest is an opportunity to begin to develop from the Fuller vision of synergy a integrated development approach that is not set to any rigid structure but is based on a new vision of living and seeing the world.