2009 : 800 MILLION OF URBAN FARMERS FOR RESPONSIBLE ECO-CITIES
The world of fast-food and frozen food is over! The urban keen interest of the beginning of our Century turns toward the garden flat bringing back the countryside in our overcrowded cities fighting from now on for a community urban agriculture able to contribute to the durability of the city and to rethink the food production.
On the roofs, terraces, balconies, in the hollow of the non-built public spaces, in the interior yards and the suspended greenhouses, the eco-warrior aspires to escape from its competitive and consumeristic universe imposed by the laws of the market. He desires to cultivate its immediate landscape so as to better take root in the ground by creating his own ecologic and alimentary biodiversity. The consumer becomes from then on producer and the garden inhabitant !
From the Parisian « worker gardens » to the « community gardens » of New York going though Muscovite « vegetable squares », eight hundred million of urban farmers, i.e. more than one human being out of ten, consume nowadays chlorophyllous products from these cosmopolitan kitchen gardens. These new gardens, aware of the emergency to reduce our fuel consumption and the necessity to modify our behaviour facing the climatic changes, decrease thus their environmental impact and build eco-responsible cities on a community way.
PROGRAM : A Metabolic Farm for Urban Agriculture / Mixing Uses
LOCATION : New York City, Roosevelt Island
SURFACE AREA : 350.000 m²
HEIGHTS : Antenna=700m; Roof=600m; Top Floor=575m
FLOOR COUNT : 132
AGRICULTURAL FIELDS : 28
MODEL STUDIES : Philippe Steels
PERSPECTIVES : Benoit Patterlini
Images and texts:Vincent Callebaut
