Why is vertical agriculture likely going to be important in the future? One of the most pressing problems humanity will have to face in the near future will be meeting the food demand of a rapidly increasing population while the availability of land on which to grow or farm food will become more and more scarce.
The Spanish Architectural firm Japa tried to reply with the proposal of a project called F.R.A.: Floating Responsive Agriculture. Singapore, with a population of 5.4 millions of people crammed into 716 square kilometres -the highest in the world-, looked like the perfect spot to test the utility of the project.
Currently Singapore imports over 90% of its food, at the same time the country is rich in water, which would make growing food easy.
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The architects developed a project consisting in a number of towers floating on the water and surrounding Singapore to make it convenient for its citizens to access fresh food.
The floating towers have double-L or loop shape to maximise sun exposure and, even more impressively, are meant to be connected via network to the local markets to adapt food production to demand thus minimising food waste.
The project is still at a conceptual stage but the architects are planning to build a small scale prototype soon.
If this project featuring vertical agriculture in Singapore will demonstrate its feasibility, it will certainly be able to at least partially solve the problem of feeding big scale cities, with the added bonuses of minimising fuel consumption due to food transportation and refrigeration, increasing food security and freshness, reducing costs and waste.
Here is an interesting video on the project:
Video: Courtesy of Forward Thinking Architecture
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