See on Scoop.it - Yellow Boat Social Entrepreneurism

Laboratoire d’Urbanisme Agricole..

https://www.facebook.com/pages/LUA-Laboratoire-dUrbanisme-Agricole/284566424913101

http://www.lua-paris.com/# ;

https://twitter.com/luaparis ;

@LUAPARIS

Le LUA [Laboratoire d’Urbanisme Agricole/Agricultural Urbanism Lab] est une plateforme de réflexion et d’échange sur l’urbanisme agricole + les fermes urbaines

Paris · http://www.lua-paris.com 

http://www.ryerson.ca/carrotcity/index.html ;

http://www.lua-paris.com/en/ideas/introduction ;

Introduction

To take agriculture out of the countryside and produce fruit and vegetables in towers would be a major upheaval and the possible realisation of the fantasies and nightmares it has engendered: dreams of autonomous green cities or apocalyptic visions of food grown in laboratories to feed all-devouring population growth. Yet despite the countless benefits of urban market gardening and its less obvious limitations, there are still very few examples. From a theoretical point of view, there have been a few futurist projects defined ex nihilo and gravitating around Dickson Despommier’s gigantic prototype. On a practical level, several small horticultural greenhouse projects have been installed on the roofs of former factories in Canada and the United States. But the problem of the architect remains: how to integrate the farm into the city.

Because the urban farm and intensive urban agriculture really can provide a solution far surpassing the individual and collective vegetable gardens that are so popular when space can be found for them. So we are not proposing an ideal scenario for a new town or city like Le Corbusier’s Plan Voisin, but developing case studies to question the limits of compatibility between the technical requirements of intensive agriculture and the cultural heritage of our cities.


A multi-disciplinary project

The Urban Agriculture Laboratory is a collective, multi-disciplinary project drawing on comprehensive, wide-ranging analyses. Estimating the limits of compatibility between intensive farming and the urban environment involves a variety of different disciplines:

- the choice of plant species, growing methods, productivity and quality: agriculture and agronomy
- health and energy exchanges with the city: environmental engineering
- the future of an endangered profession and the prospects of dynamizing it in an urban context: sociology and economics and the rural world.
- the reduction of transport, distribution methods: economics and regional development strategy.
- the long-term evolution of the concepts of verticality and locality, the aesthetics of the urban environment, traceability in the food industry and taste: philosophy
- the questions of real estate, the creation of urban and peri-urban areas, the advantages of a mixed urban environment and the image of industry within it: urbanism and demography.



See on lua-paris.com