9 April - 30 May 2009

London Yields:
Urban Agriculture
In 2007 Lord Cameron of Dillington, first head of the
Countryside Agency, famously remarked that Britain
was ‘nine meals away from anarchy’. Our food supply
is almost totally dependent on oil (95% of the food we
eat is oil-dependent) and if the supply to Britain was
suddenly cut off Lord Cameron estimated it would take
just three full days before law and order broke down.
We rely on a particularly vulnerable system. Britain
needs to seriously invest in agriculture infrastructure if
we are to avoid food crisis.
Cities are the most likely to feel the effects of any
food shortages. In 2000 consultants Best Foot Forward
estimated that Londoners consumed 6.9 million tonnes
of food, of which 81% came from outside the UK.
With a weakening pound, importing food has become
increasingly expensive. The transformation of cities
from consumers to generators of food provides food
security, contributes to sustainability and improved
health and helps to alleviate poverty.
This exhibition demonstrates various methods
by which food production can be incorporated into the
urban environment at both an industrial and domestic
level. We hope to help stimulate the debate and raise
public awareness of our increasingly fragile relationship
with the food we rely on and the methods of bringing it
to our table.
1. The Urban Agriculture Curtain
Bohn & Viljoen Architects with Hadlow College

Urban food growing is mostly associated with outdoor, large-scale

activities, be it widely pursued allotment gardening or more commercial
and spatially planned urban agriculture concepts.
This installation proposes a complimentary option to the above: the
vertical, indoor growing of fresh vegetables. Apart from suggesting a
new way of furnishing an office, café or flat, the growing field is four
times as space efficient as its horizontal equivalent. The fresh produce
grows year-round, ready to be eaten off the plant.
In this high-yield, low-maintenance system of hydroponics, eight
planting trays are hung on an off-the-shelf cable system and connected
by pipe to a nutrient rich water supply. The planting trays need to be
turned every week to expose their plants equally to the sun, and the fill
level of the tank has to be checked on a regular basis.
The produce from The Urban Agriculture Curtain will be harvested
every two weeks (at which point the trays will be restocked with new
seedlings) and used in The Building Centre Café.
 Shadwell allotments, East London. Photography James Potter
2. Capital Growth

The Capital Growth campaign will create 2,012 new food growing spaces by
2012 and offer practical and financial support to communities in London.
In recent years there has been a tremendous upsurge of interest
in food growing. This is in response to concerns about food prices, food
miles and the environment. It is also because people want better access
to good, healthy, affordable food, to enjoy cultivating green spaces and
meeting local people.
Just under a third of London’s total area is either green space or
water. There is also a large amount of roof space that can be used. We
have the space available, we just need to use it!
The initial phase of Capital Growth will establish the first 50
new London food growing spaces representing a diverse range of
communities, boroughs and sizes of growing space. The long-term
aim is to help projects with practical support such as advice, training,
tools, seeds, equipment and support for communities in approaching
landowners and dealing with planning issues.
3. Croydon Roof Divercity
AOC, Croydon Council, Mikey Tomkins and Paul Richens

Croydon Metropolitan Centre is extremely well connected and an

Opportunity Area in the London Plan. However, despite its
uncompromisingly urban looks, central Croydon only has 5,000 residents
and many of its 1960s office blocks are redundant and vacant.
Seeing this vacancy as an opportunity - and projecting forward to a
future where central Croydon’s population has increased to over 20,000
- AOC’s Croydon Roof Divercity (2004) imagines refreshing the city’s
roofscape to provide a landscape of amenity, culture and production.
Market gardens and allotments reduce food miles whilst lush forests
attract new birdlife. Meanwhile, residents frolic in rooftop meadows and
splash about in South London’s loftiest lido.
In 2008, the speculation started to become reality when a crop of
new green roofs in central Croydon were complemented with a vegetable
garden on the roof of Q Park’s Surrey Street Car Park, devised and
installed by Croydon Council, rooftop garden guru Paul Richens and
Mikey Tomkins.
4. Farmadelphia
Front Studio

Farmadelphia proposes to transform the urban environment by

introducing bucolic farmlands into the city’s urban fabric. Farmadelphia
adopts the extensive sprawl of overgrown lots and vacant buildings as a
source of inspiration while fortifying and reinforcing Philadelphia’s green
legacy. Each block maintains responsibility for its own farm harvest,
encouraging entrepreneurship throughout the larger community.
The creation of localised centres of activity, each related to a
specific crop, promotes small town relationships while strengthening
an overall sense of pride and commitment in the community. The
‘Farmadeliphication’ of once decrepit buildings into farm structures
advances fresh ways of seeing old structures as well as allowing for an
organic transformation of history that contributes to the present day
fabric. The irony of the farm and the city ceases to be a paradox as both
function as one integral machine, combining the pleasure of open sky and
land with the richness of city living.
5. Monsanto New Garden City
Geoff Shearcroft / AOC

‘Keen to repair their British image, Monsanto* propose modifying the

Borough of Hackney to create their vision for a new garden city.
‘Applying their philosophy of ‘increasing the yield’, Monsanto import
a five year strip development rotation to the disparate housing, failing
schools and bleak open spaces of the Agricultural Action Zone (AAZ).
Costly infrastructural components are replaced with a self-sufficient
ecology of grass roads, localised rainwater collection, organic solar
films and biological compost systems. Within the strips, topographical
proposals distort the datum, enveloping existing buildings and liberating
the ground’s agricultural potential.
‘The city farm becomes the key controlling node in the physical, social
and agricultural networks of the AAZ. The AAZ becomes an evolving
billboard - a highly profitable realisation of the Monsanto brand.’
*This project was generated at the Royal College of Art for educational purposes
only. It is not endorsed by Monsanto or any commercial or government organisation.
6. High-rise Learning
John Hibbett, University of Brighton

The School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme is being run by local education
authorities around the country. Under the scheme, children aged
between four and six in LEA maintained schools are entitled to a free
piece of fruit or vegetable each day- the aim being to encourage healthy
eating in children from a young age.
This design proposal looks to elaborate on this idea, providing a
space in an urban area for school children to attend practical lessons on
how to grow a variety of vegetables. The high density of London means
that design solutions which engage with the idea of vertical growing are
important, while the building would also provide accommodation for a
number of teachers on a lower income. As London continues to grow
and the necessity to provide urban growing areas increases, educational
facilities which teach children how to grow their own food in a ‘hands-on’
way will become more important.
7. Meal Assembly Centre
Jonathan Gales, University of Brighton

Existing urban agriculture projects, such as Brighton’s thriving

allotment culture, can be the catalyst for the generation of interest in
productive urban landscapes. Here a Meal Assembly Centre (M.A.C)
provides space for community composting, cultivation and cooking.
Spaces like this can act as change agents if a wider public is invited to
use them; they demonstrate the potential for creating more experience
with less consumption. This lightly structured M.A.C. becomes part of
its sloping productive landscape. Liminal walls not only act as thickened
definitions between cultivation and preparation, but also store and
process the content and produce of the centre.
Growing and decomposing through the seasons, the M.A.C.
celebrates the festive nature of an allotment and helps to provide rural
opportunities in an urban environment.
Opportunity Map The Urban Farming Project Middlesbrough, DOTT 2007

The Continuous Picnic, London Festival of Architecture 2008

8. The Continuous Productive Urban Landscape
Bohn & Viljoen Architects

Continuous Productive Urban Landscape, developed by Bohn &Viljoen

and published in 2005, is considered one of the pioneering urban design
concepts that seeks to provide a holistic approach to urban sustainability.
Focusing on the introduction of connected and productive parcels of open
land into contemporary European cities, the concept introduced urban
agriculture into the urban design and planning discourse.
A lot has happened since then: issues of C02 emissions, food miles,
biodiversity, lifestyle choices, healthy eating, SlowFood and self-
sufficiency kept making headlines, community initiatives to cultivate
land have sprung up and the Edible City is now much talked about.
These two projects - The Continuous Picnic and The Urban Farming
Project Middlesbrough - deal with two of the most important CPUL
issues: the novel use of urban land and the involvement of an urban
public ready to embark on a new urban lifestyle vision.
9. King’s Vine London
Soonil Kim, Architectural Association

Inspired by the urban grains and especially the railway network from
both St. Pancras and King’s Cross Station which surrounds the site, the
design is a formal continuation of the topography while reinforcing the
colonisation of air space by winery branches.
An audacious structure, the winery and the vineyard are connected
by a suspended transport network enabling the use of ground space for a
public park. With capacity to produce 10,000 bottles of red wine annually,
the project re-articulates private and public space, blending productive
infrastructure with quality areas for Londoners and tourists.
King’s Vine London and Farmacy (see 10) are the result of work in
the Intermediate Unit 3 course at the Architectural Association. The
unit explores the crossbreeding of industrial landscape and architecture
to create new urban scripts.
10. Farmacy
Samantha Lee, Architectural Association

King’s Cross Farmacy is a proposal for a farm which grows, manufactures

and sells medicinal herbs. With the infamous connection that King’s Cross
has with illegal substances, but also in the process of its regeneration,
this farm plays a role in its journey of healing. Herbs were selected
according to ailments specific to a city like London – stress, insomnia,
colds and depression.
The growth of the herbs takes place within nets, stretched along
the deteriorated brick wall of Regent’s Canal, where visitors either pass
by to experience the fragrance of the herbal gardens, or can purchase
from the pharmacies. The wall also acts as a division between staff and
visitors, where back passages are used to access the herbs.
The Gas Holders now house space for the factory and its machinery
necessary to wash, dry, grind and distil these herbs into their commercial
state. There, the visitor finds walkways and look-out points completing
the experience of this factory and farm.
 Photography Bohn and Viljoen Architects
11. Havana, Cuba

Seventy five percent of Cuba’s 11 million plus inhabitants live in cities

and it is the only remaining Western socialist society.
In the 1990s following the collapse of the Eastern Europe block with
which Cuba conducted over 80% of its trade, and the strengthening of
the US sanctions, the food supply to Cuba was severely affected, losing
over 75% of its import and export capacity.
Twenty seven percent of the population of Cuba live in its capital
city, Havana, and the average population density is 3,014 persons/km2.
Following the crisis of the 1990s many people started to grow vegetables
in their backyards and front gardens. National and provincial government
encouraged this cultivation and urged people to occupy every free space
with vegetables and crops.
Today Havana is recognised as a world leader in urban agriculture
with more than 50% of fresh produce grown within the city limits, using
in the main organic compost, the controlled use of waste from sewage
works and simple irrigation systems.
12. Agri-cademy
Fergus Feilden, Royal College of Art

Growing out of Burgess Park, this studio school bridges into the existing
infrastructures of the Aylesbury Estate and beyond. It operates as
both an independent farm and as a training facility for excluded and
marginalised young people, generating skilled workers and providing
‘green’ routes out of London and poverty. Students live and work on
site, earning a real income whilst learning.
With a symbiotic relationship between agriculture and academia,
the system is bio-dynamic, behaving as an organism capable of self-
nourishment. It is a prototype for future agri-cademies, made possible
through failing housing and the city’s waste products (specifically grass
cuttings) and a youthful labour force.
Livestock over-wintered in stock-blocks are processed through
the educational spaces thereby interconnecting processes, animals and
people. These linkages form a produce spine terminating in the market,
knitting the academy into its community.
13. Towards New Capital
Ian Douglas-Jones, Royal College of Art

‘A response is necessary to the current era of economic, social and

climatic uncertainty. Notions of production and consumption must be
realigned. Investment must shift, new capital must be sought. Towards
New Capital acts to bolster our confidence in the future. The project
appropriates now defunct acres of retail space and the city’s untapped
resource – rooftops – for food production and distribution, in essence
producing a branding strategy for the relocalisation of our most basic
production requirement: food.
‘Towards New Capital uses rules and a premise of adaptation rather
than sustainability. At a community scale, the city as villages concept is
rekindled with a new exemplary village. Densification and intensification
is necessary: The Isle of Dogs is appropriated and encircled by a green
ring of land reclaimed from the Thames – a grand gesture that enables
the provision of food and energy for the new exemplary community
within; it is the embodiment of social and environmental capital.’
The Building Centre
Store Street
London WC1E 7BT
T: +44 (0) 207 692 4000
www.buildingcentre.co.uk

Thanks:
Andre Viljoen
Anna Terzi
David Barrie
Fuller Smith & Turner plc
Gian Luca Amadei
Hadlow College
Igma Imaging
Lara Gibson
Katrin Bohn
Ken Salisbury
Michelle Beaumont
NaJa & deOstos
Ronald Hunt
Rosie Boycott
The Studio of Fernando Gutiérrez