Designing for Food and Agriculture: Recent Explorations at Ryerson University

Abstract

Strategies to enable alternative urban food systems cannot be developed alone by those involved with the production and distribution aspects of food systems. It is important for architects, landscape designers and planners to be part of the process of conceiving and implementing innovative food-system thinking. Environmentally focused building standards and models for sustainable communities can easily incorporate farmers' markets, greenhouses, edible landscapes, permeable paving, green roofs, community gardens, and permaculture and other food-related strategies that complement energy generation and conservation, green roofs, living walls, and other approaches that have been more commonly part of sustainable built-environment initiatives. Recently, architecture faculty and students at Ryerson University in Toronto and at a number of other universities have been exploring the intersection of these disciplines and interests. This paper will show how Ryerson tackled agricultural and food issues as design challenges in projects that included first-year community investigations, student-run design competitions, third-year studio projects and complex final-year thesis projects. These projects that dealt with food issues proved to be excellent entry points for addressing a range of design challenges including social inclusion, cultural context, community design and sustainable building practices.

Planning of Urban Green Spaces: An Ecological Perspective on Human Benefits

“…This strategy can be achieved by creating a low or even "no-input system" around a sustainable food infrastructure [168,169] that produces a "closed-loop entity" in terms of waste recycling that is able to reduce pollution [164]. The connection of urban needs, ecological and productive activities at the scale of the building is a strong ambition that can support the sustainability of the cities, reducing the environmental impacts generated by urban waste [164,170,171].…”

Growing a student organic garden within the context of university sustainability initiatives

“…The gardens and farms often promote responsibility and technical expertise of both students and faculty (Rojas et al, 2007;Albrecht, 2010;Scoggins, 2010). Most importantly, campus gardens and farms bring important benefits to the campus community such as applied education and research, service learning, unique educational projects, integration of separate disciplines and opportunities for community involvement (Rojas et al, 2007;Komisar et al, 2009;Albrecht, 2010;Kobayashi et al, 2010;Scoggins, 2010;Waliczek and Zajicek, 2010;Ahonen et al, 2012).…”

WETWALL : an innovative design concept for the treatment of urban wastewaters

“…On the other hand, considering future threats related to the exponential increment of food demand, scarcity of local resources such as water and land, and climate change, the adoption of soilless agriculture has been proposed as a sustainable alternative to produce food at an urban scale [5][6][7][8][9]. According to Komisar et al (2009) [10], "Reconnecting cities to their food systems is now emerging as one of the core components of the design of more sustainable urban settlements". In this regard, hydroponic systems can be applied in buildings, which can improve supply chains while reducing transport distance and time of storage [8].…”