Heavy machinery and long-distance trucking and shipping are the main sources of emissions. Adding farms is seen by Elizabeth Sawin, founder and director of the Multisolving Institute, as a way to reduce emissions from cars. She says that a lot of the square footage of our cities is devoted to the automobile. More space for living with things like public transportation and dense housing could be used to grow food. Replacing asphalt with seeds would transform the city into a people-centered system.
Bousselot is using solar panels to increase food security and energy security. The idea is to grow crops under rooftop solar panels that produce free, abundant energy for the building underneath them. The green roof acts like insulation for the structure, reducing its cooling needs, while the partial shade the panels provide for the plants can increase yields. It's bad for certain crops to get too much sun. Other researchers have found that peppers produce more fruit under solar panels than in the sun. Bousselot has seen tomatoes grow faster on a roof.
She has a rooftop in Denver that protects her crops from diseases. Bousselot says that there's very little issue with that because of the high-wind, high-solar-radiation conditions. I think there's a lot of potential for crops to be grown on a rooftop compared to the ground.
The cost of building farms in cities is an inherent challenge that rurbanization has to contend with. Urban real estate is more expensive than rural land and community gardeners are up against investors trying to turn empty spaces into money. While rooftop real estate is less competitive, you can't just slap a bunch of crops on a roof and expect to make a lot of money.
The beauty of rurbanization is that buildings don't have to compete for space Brooklyn Grange operates the world's largest rooftop soil farms because of the limited urban land. Plakias said that they approach the design of their own urban farms and those they build for clients with the consideration of the unique character of the community in which they are building it. It is important that urban farms nourish urban communities and that the properties valued by one community might vary from another.
A garden on a side lot doesn't need a lot of space to grow. New developments could incorporate solar roofs from the start, since they would have more upfront costs, but still produce free energy and food.
No one is suggesting that city dwellers will get all of the food they need. Bousselot thinks of it as a collaboration between commercial farmers and urban gardeners, with both creating jobs and decreasing the length of the supply chain.
A renewed sense of community is what it would provide. She says that that is a source of local connection that will spread beyond just the food that is produced. Sharing resources to help one another through shocks and destabilization is one of the things people have social networks for.
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