What if cities grew their own food? Is such a thing even possible? Hydroponics? Roof top gardens? Small scale might be doable.

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

They do. It's called "the surrounding farmland."

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

It's also called "suburban vegetable gardens", "inner-city plots" and "greenhouses".

- Maha (I'm a horticulturist, I should know) Vailo

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When you get down to it, Science answers how. Religion answers why. - hippietrekx

Even Oliver Douglas gave up on his terrace farm.

Seriously though; I think any space saving methods available in an urban setting are going to be very cost prohibitive.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

you're the perfect person for this question (sorta)....how about large scale???? I'm not talking about hobby gardens....

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places. ~ Ernest Hemingway ...

See, but property in urban areas is expensive - prohibitively so for agriculture.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

Each building could alternate one story for living, one for growing high-output foods. (And instead of sewers, there'd be composting centers underground to save space.)

Probably cost massively, and require a total rebuild of infrastructure, but the OP asked if it was possible, not practical.

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Yes. Consider that to purchase a parking space in New York City can cost well over $100,000. For a single parking space.

Now try to buy enough space to grow some food. Those would be some really pricey vegetables.

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All right. We'll call it a draw!

I've seen conceptual views and discussions like that and it does sound possible. Contiguous floors instead of alternating would be better. There wouldn't be as much weatherproofing protection to consider.

Water would need to be pumped in. Even if you could trap the rain from the footprint of the building, it would be insufficient by a factor of the number of levels that are being fed.

Same goes with light. Even if you put light collectors/redirectors up, you will still lose intensity by dividing it among the floors.

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Numbers are not case sensitive. (me)

Banquo, I suspect you are not a bad person. Don't take this as an attack.

But a lot of the seemingly good ideas you have been presenting lately would only work if you had despotic powers and rode roughshod over individual freedoms. Think Pol Pot. He took a lot of ideas that really looked good on paper and tried to force it into reality with the result that literally millions died.

That and you really need a course in mainstream economics. The Dharma and Greg alternative economies *can't* be made to work by someone not well grounded in economy in general.

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Pol Pot cared more about the idea than the people. That's where he went wrong.

I've thought about creating an organic produce market in which people grow their own organic food in their backyards, mostly because I like to garden and grow foods.

Medieval towns did grow foods on their small years and plots of lands, however, that was a suppliment and not their whole diet. They still relied on outside food. Much like we do today.

I can see the tops of buildings being transformed into farms in NYNY.

Why live on the land? Why not live underground and grow your food on the land above?

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LOGIC, n.
The art of thinking and reasoning in strict accordance with the limitations and incapacities of the human misunderstanding.

In the Year 2525.

"One small step for (a) man. On giant leap for mankind".

If an astronaut doesn't need good grammar, niether does you.

DDT, Removing invisible elves from backyards since 1939.

IMO, people should be encouraged to grow their own crops, anyway.

Tomatoes, potatoes, peppers, cannabis....whatever.

Plant 'em if you got 'em, fellas.

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Actually, it's called: Farmer Subsidies

BILLIONS of dollars go to farmers. ($8Billion in 2004)

And that's on top of what they get for the actual goods they sell.
And some of those farmers are paid NOT to grow things.

Okay...

I wasn't trying to get into anything political, here. I was just stating that in a sense, cities do grow their own food... in the area surrounding the cities. That's where the farms send their food.

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Quaeso quousque humi defixa tua mens erit? Nonne aspicis, quae in templa veneris?

That's a good idea, Banquo! I think one of Frank Loyd Wright's model cities had farmland for each house.

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For it to be feasible you'll need a totally planned city from the beginning, with a highly developed public transport system and strict zoning, in a country where people would be willing to park their cars away from home or even do without owning one.

Retrofitting it to a high-rise city would be a disaster, but designing a city for it from the beginning might be possible.

Problem is that it would cost a lot to make the infrastructure that would make it interesting to move there, money you wouldn't get back until people started moving in.

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Sewage, tanks, bacteria, energy souce, food. No problem. Well, no problem apart from convincing people to eat it.

Once again, if the price for transporting food gets super expensive, it will start to make sense to grow more and more food from a city's local surroundings. People will stop buying food imported from across the country and world, and buy more locally. They'll hate not being able to buy strawberries in winter, but boo hoo.

And the higher transportation costs go, the range of imported food will shrink until most food is grown nearby the city. Cities that don't have fertile lands around them will have a more expensive cost of living. Just like it's expensive to live in Alaska or the desert.

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I'm afraid I don't really see how transporting food long distances can become super expensive. People have mentioned increasing oil prices, but ship and rail transport are extremely energy efficient compared to current road transport, so it would take extraordinary price increases to cause large reductions in the amount of food they ship, and neither rail nor shipping has to depend on oil. For that matter road transport doesn't need to rely on oil either.

I agree, and as mentioned before, the current prices are above the cost of even "unconventional" oil and synthetic fuel from coal production. There can be a period while production catches up with demand, but long term, these are unsupportable prices.

Eventually, of course, we'll move away from fossil fuel use to long term energy sources, but that's not something that will happen real soon.

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