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Spiraling Skyscraper Farms For a Future Manhattan
Mike writes "One of three finalists in this year's Evolo Skyscraper Competition, Eric Vergne's Dystopian Farm project envisions a future New York City interspersed with elegantly spiraling skyscraper farms. The biomorphic structures harness cutting-edge technology to provide the city with its own self-sustaining food source while dynamically altering the fabric of city life."
We already have millions of people, today, living without any meat.
Hmmm.... From the article:
>By 2050 nearly 80% of the worldâ(TM)s population will reside in urban centers, and 109 hectares of arable land will be needed to feed them.
109 hectares is all we will need to feed all of the worlds city population! Cool... ;)
Though getting to your points:
>Plants (especially plants like alfalfa or grasses [wikivisual.com] as depicted) have massive root systems requiring literally tons of soil to be healthy.
No not really... What plants need are nutrients, sun, and water. Soil is not necessary actually. What soil does is moderate the distribution of those things.
>Plants need water. Lots of water.
Well that depends. It depends on how you will distribute the water to them.
>Buildings don't like water.
Not necessarily, it really depends on the materials used to build them.
> Plants die & rot (it's natural). Rotting plants smell. People don't like smelly buildings.
Plants need to be trimmed and taken care off. We have a gardening philosophy where you grow and let it die.
>Currently we use large machines to cultivate plants because it sucks, none of these images look like that would be possible.
How about the iRobot company?
For example you do the following:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydroponics
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
What is this idiot planning to do, have a zillion megawatts/acre of grow lights on all the lower levels?
Perhaps this idiot is planning to harness the power of the sun like every other farmer does. Maybe he even has a technology already at his disposal that would make it feasible and cost effective.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Why not? They do it in Japan.... http://blog.japundit.com/archives/2008/02/17/7904/
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
There seems to be a cognitive disconnect in scale when folks view proposals like these. Hydroponics and aeroponics work at the scale of gardening, not industrial agriculture. So of course you're not going to get massive monocrop yields out of a building like this. But then, that's not the point of a garden.
After all, the amount of light the building can receive is limited to the area of its footprint plus the area of the shadow it sweeps out multiplied by the duration of time that light falls on that area, adjusting for rates of luminal energy influx (so those long shadows at the end of the day aren't worth much...). Compared to even a modest size farm, that area is going to be small. Compared to industrial farming where crops are planted on tens of thousands of acres, well, projects like this are a drop in the bucket by comparison.
Think of it as community gardening, and then the scale of your thinking will match up correctly to reality.
A-Bomb
you have obviously not shopped for groceries anywhere other than NYC.
Prices are usually 50%-200% higher here for groceries in my super market in Queens compared to grocery stores in San Antonio, Texas where I am from. And it is the cheapest one around that I found.
Of course things in general cost twice as much here compared to San Antonio. rent, housing, gas (well about 25 cents more), groceries, labor, driving (tolls vs no tolls), movie tickets, a night out at a reasonably nice restaurant (not even something fancy, just not mcdonalds).
The 2 big ones, labor + real estate costs are going to be a huge factor in the price of food at a super market compared with whatever small discount they might receive from a shorter distance from the port to the store. Not to mention that the US is a net exporter of food last i checked so not much of your food come in a ship from over seas, but a truck instead, though possibly and often from as far away as california.
Please let me know where you are finding a cheap grocery store in this city. Ditto for cheap anything.
Actually the idiot is planning to use grow lights. It says so right in the article.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"