Project Location
Soulard Neighborhood, St. Louis
Design Completion
2019
Program
100,000 sf Urban Farmland
32,000 sf Food Hall
10,000 sf Office Space
10,00 sf Lab Space
8,000 sf Visitor’s Center
Our sources of food are in danger. Rapid changes in the planet’s climate pose a risk to the production of the food we all eat. Agricultural practices are responsible for around 14% of global greenhouse gas emissions.
Furthermore, as food supply chains grow longer and increasingly complex, consumers demand greater transparency on the quality and safety of their sources of sustenance. But how can they satisfy that hunger for knowledge about their food cycle when their food is engineered in labs, grown thousands of miles away, and gets processed in windowless factories?
With this hunger for visibility, social movements around food systems and networks have taken the form of urban agriculture projects, increasing popularity of farm-to-table menus in restaurants, and greater consumption of products from farmer’s markets around the nation.
Looking to the future, how can we design transparency in the food supply chain to better cultivate knowledge about what we eat? How do we integrate these food systems programmatically through architecture? How can the built environment utilize the synergies to provide the nourishment necessary for the growth, health, and well-being of St. Louis and its people? The answer is with nourishing, by design.
My proposal for an urban farm in St. Louis utilizes extensive research theories and methods to obtain data to hypothesize a seismic shift in the way we nourish our bodies and minds.
Agriculture could potentially be the driver of change in the way we use earth’s natural capital, produce food and tackle climate change. That is why agriculture has links to almost all of the 17 Goals in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the initiative to create a framework for sustainability spearheaded by the United Nations. My research showed that new typologies for farmland could transform the industry for the better.
The popularity of urban agriculture projects has boomed and they are becoming more significant components of St. Louis City’s urban landscape. The rising importance of these urban agriculture projects stems primarily from two elements: (A) a growing awareness of urban food systems’ role in achieving local and global sustainability goals and (B) the role urban agriculture projects can play in promoting a range of environmental, social, economic, and health benefits in the urban environment.
Cities that have taken on new initiative for legislative promotion include Portland, Seattle, New York City, and San Francisco. Some of the initiatives in these cities include amendments to local zoning ordinance, city-wide surveys, and the creation of pilot urban agriculture projects on publicly-owned land. Additionally, urban agriculture projects provide opportunities to: enhance community involvement, promote social interaction between ethnically and age diverse communities, provide a strategy for vacant property re-use, and act as catalyst for community development. The benefits provided by urban agricultures are argued to be closely aligned to the goals of public space as presented by a number of researchers in the landscape field. In St. Louis, many urban agriculture projects have been successful in creating synergies with merging communal spaces for growing food and spaces for alternative programming with educational programs, group exercise, and other communal gatherings.
As a starting point, my research qualified and evaluated how successfully communally-managed urban farms in St. Louis city utilize their environments to operate dualistically as areas for both food production and public space, and identifies the conflicts and compatibilities of the spatial considerations for both. The research asks: how can existing urban landscapes in St. Louis City designed primarily for food production also function as public space? What spatial characteristics do these communally- managed urban farms need to provide in fulfilling the criteria for successful public space?
