Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (29 page)

As I flew out over the city, getting a bird's-eye view of the pockmarked urban landscape, I couldn't see any other choices. I tried to imagine orchards and forests. Moreover, I tried to imagine people.

D
ickson Despommier's
The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century
arrived in late 2010 to as much promotion and anticipation as a book gets these days.
¹
Well before the book's publication, Despommier appeared as a guest on the
Colbert Report
, the culturally influential satirical news program on US specialty channel Comedy Central. Musician and activist Sting blurbed the book's cover. Majora Carter, a MacArthur “genius” fellow, contributed the foreword. And the
Economist
appointed Despommier “the father of vertical farming” in its magazine pages. Articles about vertical farming were seemingly everywhere at once. According to the media, the year 2010 was the year of the vertical farm—essentially a skyscraper layered with pigs, fish, arugula, tomatoes, and lettuce. There was just one problem. No one had yet built one.

Sure, there were a number of architectural renderings on paper just waiting for a visionary developer or a wealthy billionaire looking for a legacy project. Despommier's book features images of the thirty-story
verdant spiraling staircase that American architect Blake Kurasek envisioned as his 2008 graduate thesis project at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
²
It also includes the drawing for the Dragonfly vertical farm concept, an elaborate 132-floor wing-shaped “metabolic farm for urban agriculture” designed for the New York City skyline by Belgian architect Vincent Callebaut.
³
These visions were (and still are) undeniably intellectually interesting and aesthetically impressive, as are those of Despommier and fellow professor Eric Ellingsen's own glass pyramidal farm.
⁴
Ellingsen's work was designed with Abu Dhabi in mind, as it is likely the only city with the money to build such structures for food production. These vertical farms, however, would likely come with a $100 million price tag or more—perhaps just one of the reasons they remain more science fiction than food-growing reality.

A few years ago, not many outside academia had heard the term
vertical farm
, but the concept has been around since the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, with its mythical living walls of cascading greenery. With traditional farming being so land-, water-, labor-, and fuel-intensive, it was a logical leap to transform the two-dimensional nature of farming by shrinking its footprint radically and adding a third dimension: height. A farm built as a high-rise, with different crops or livestock layered on every floor, could conceivably allow large-scale food production right into the middle of any space-starved urban setting.

The vertical farming school of thought has led to some provocative designs. MVRDV, a Dutch design firm, proposed Pig City in 2001, an open-air forty-story farm that would house fifteen million pigs and produce enough organic pork for half a million people and endless amounts of manure for biogas.
⁵
It earned the vertical farm an early nickname of “sty-scraper.” Other open-air vertical-farming concepts emerged soon after on architects’ drawing boards in Toronto, Vancouver, Paris, and Chicago, but none were actually built.

The most recent wave of vertical-farming ideas is especially focused on “closed-loop systems.” (Think a traditional mixed farm, sliced into
layers, stacked vertically, and hermetically sealed under glass.) Livestock waste is intensively recycled as plant fertilizer; freshwater fish grow in tanks and produce nutrient-rich water for salad crops; water loss due to evaporation is minimized; and the whims of Mother Nature no longer interrupt the 24/7, 365-day-a-year indoor growing system. Hungry deer, grasshoppers, and other pests wouldn't devastate crops. Climate wouldn't matter—nor would climate change, droughts, or mid-crop hailstorms.

For some, this will be the only way to feed our growing cities in scenarios of nine billion people living in the megacities of the very near future. For others, it's putting the cart before the horse. Vertical-farm designers and architects talk about aeroponics (soilless growing where roots are merely misted with nutrient-dense water), hydroponics (growing plants in nutrient-rich water but without the need for soil), and aquaponics (indoor fish farming tied in with hydroponic techniques to form a self-cleansing and self-fertilizing water-recycling loop) as if we've perfected these techniques. We've been experimenting with them on rather small scales, but large-scale farming is another matter. The technology isn't there yet. Then again, Leonardo da Vinci drew models for helicopters in the fifteenth century.

What will push the technology forward? Maybe a combination of factors that are currently upon us: Climate change, rapid urbanization, the rise in fuel costs of conventional farming and transportation, and population growth may finally stretch our current food resources to the limits.

Time will tell if these models, or versions of them, will become viable as the technology catches up to the visions of the future of urban farming. For that to happen, however, a lot of ground will have to be covered. Specifically, there will have to be a significant leap in construction and indoor growing technology, especially for the fanciful vertical-farm skyscrapers in Despommier's book to leap from page into being.

Just when I thought the vertical farm was decades away from becoming a reality and that we'd continue to imagine elaborate futuristic scenarios that seemed to completely ignore that agriculture is a marginal business, I learned of Chicago industrial developer John Edel and the new urban reuse project he's calling The Plant. It lacked the ego-driven designs of the other vertical farms that were languishing on paper, and its modesty and practicality made the idea of an indoor multistory farm seem feasible. It was enough to make me want to take a look for myself. After all, if Edel could accomplish even a modest version of a vertical farm, it would be urban-agriculture history in the making. I made plans to visit Chicago to see The Plant in its early stages of becoming the world's first, albeit four-story, vertical farm.
⁶

T
HE
P
LANT
, C
HICAGO

As Blake Davis took off his dust mask and slapped puffs of concrete off his hands, he joked, “Clearly, as you can see, I'm a college professor.”
⁷
Davis, a burly Chicagoan with a crew cut and a constant grin, teaches urban agriculture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. The day I met him, however, he was putting some skills to use from his preprofessorial days. His worn Carhartt® work jacket and overalls were covered in fine concrete dust from jackhammering concrete floors rotten with moisture. By afternoon, he'd be wielding a plasma torch—like a welding torch, but it cuts through stainless steel, slicing panels of it out of meat smokers for food-safe countertops and other novel reuses. Chicago had “literally, millions of square feet” of vacant, often abandoned, industrial space right in the city,” Davis said. “It costs too much to tear down.”

Davis was just one of several members of Edel's team of highly skilled, sustainability-minded volunteers determined to strip the former 1925-built, 93,500-square-foot (8,700-square-meter) meatpacking plant back to its outer red-brick shell and put as much of the recycled materials back into use to create a working model for a vertical farm.

While other entrepreneurs might be tight-lipped about their prototype projects—vertical farms are the current holy grail of urban agriculture, and there will likely be significant amounts of money for those who can deliver workable models—Edel instead cleared a few hours to show me around his “fixer-upper.” He let me roam at will to chat with people like Davis, Alex Poltorak (another volunteer with engineering credentials), and Audrey Thibault (an industrial designer who, as her jobs kept leaving for China, figured that she “just wanted to be part of something awesome” like The Plant).
⁸

It's an experiment in motion with two rather ambitious purposes. If Edel and his team can figure out the right models and mix of elements that actually work synergistically, they will have built a viable physical and economic model for a vertical farm. Edel also intends that The Plant
will serve as an open-source laboratory and catalyst for industrial reuse in a city that has no shortage of ready-built shells just waiting for a reason to remain standing.

Chicago's Stockyards

In 1878, Gustavus Swift built the first refrigerated rail car, which quickly allowed the meatpacking industry to concentrate in Chicago, scale up to incredible efficiencies, and go on to dominate the national market. By the turn of the 1900s, the Union Stockyards covered 435 acres (176 hectares) and became known as “the hog butcher to the world.” If that was a slight exaggeration, it was at least the butcher that fed America. Eighty-two percent of the meat consumed in the United States at the time came from the Union Stockyards. It achieved huge efficiencies of scale that had never been attempted in livestock agriculture before. Historic photos show aerial views of the forty acres (sixteen hectares) of cattle and hog pens; what would now be referred to as a Concentrated Animal Feedlot Operation (CAFO).

The industrialized meat trade came with significant hidden costs then as it does now. The poverty, squalor, and brutal working (and living) conditions experienced by workers in the meatpacking industry were immortalized in Upton Sinclair's 1906 novel
The Jungle.
Waves of cheap, nonunionized immigrant and “underclass” labor allowed for the innovation of assembly-line slaughtering, butchering, and processing of the carcasses.
⁹

The Back of the Yards neighborhood came to life as a bedroom community, if you will, for the waves of immigrants who cut and packed meat, and for the various businesses—tanneries, soap manufacturers, and instrument-string makers, for example—that surrounded the meatpacking industry on the south and west boundary of the Union Stockyards. By the 1950s, however, meatpacking was headed west, closer to the herds and where land was cheaper. The stockyards officially closed in
1971, and the only relic from that era is a giant limestone entrance arch. Back of the Yards transitioned somewhat into an industrial park. But over the years, the massive infrastructure had a dwindling reason to exist. And when industry leaves, as it did in this part of Chicago, infrastructure is left to crumble and decay. The scale of the surplus in Chicago has generally led to blight.

Much of what I saw as I left Chicago's vibrant skyscrapers and downtown core known as the Loop and made my way to the city's historic stockyards and Back of the Yards’ district was heading in the direction of decay and blight. There were too many gaps in the residential streets where houses should otherwise be standing together. There were too many rusted padlocks on gates and chain-link fences encircling trucking depots, warehouses, and factories of indeterminate purposes. The businesses that remained were the signposts of a neighborhood in decline: fast-food joints, liquor stores, and convenience stores with bars on the windows.

The red-brick Peer Foods building, built in 1925 and added to over the years, was a holdout; the family-owned specialty smoked- and cured-meat company had stayed in business in the Back of the Yards until 2007.

At the time, Edel was in negotiations with the city to buy a six-hundred-thousand-square-foot World War One armory turned vacant Chicago Board of Education building. Faced with a $12 million demolition price tag, the city seemed prepared to sell it for $1.
¹⁰

Edel already had a bit of local reputation for industrial building rehab. He had left a lucrative broadcast television design job that involved too much computer-assisted drawing and modeling to instead scratch an itch for preserving historic buildings by finding low-cost creative uses for them and reusing the materials that were simply lying around inside most of them.

In 2002, he bought a 1910 paint factory that had been officially unoccupied since the 1960s and had since become a derelict, bike-gang-ridden building with shot-out windows. (The building, in Edel's words, had been colonized by “lots of tough guys” with names like Googs, Mack, Santa Claus, the Boob, and Cowboy. There were “lots of guns,
lots of knives,” involved in the “informal economy” that had taken over the building.) Edel completely reformed the 24,000-square-foot (2,230-square-meter) building, putting his industrial design training, a tremendous amount of personal and volunteer sweat equity, and innate scavenger mentality into play. Useful industrial machines, like a giant, old air compressor that was left behind, were put back into service to run the air chisels used to poke holes in brick walls and the jackhammer used to remove unwanted concrete. Scrap sheet metal was refashioned to create such items as a new entrance awning, and former machine-tool parts and pipes found lying around became an art-school-esque stairway banister. Edel planted a living green roof with thousands of heat- and drought-tolerant sedum (a succulent plant that needs little irrigation) to mitigate storm water runoff and installed cisterns to catch rainwater for reuse in the building. (Seen from above, or on Google Earth®, the thousands of sedum create a red-and-green pattern of Edel's daughter's smiling face.)