Contribution of Vertical Farms to Increase the Overall Energy Efficiency of Urban Agglomerations

Podmirseg Daniel

Institute for Buildings and Energy Technical University, Graz, Austria.

DOI: 10.4236/jpee.2014.24013                

Abstract

The 21st century keeps huge challenges for the system “city”. Shortage of resources and world population growth forces architects to think in spaces with increasingly more structural linkages. No era has shaped the system of a city like the oil age did. Its grown structures are dependent from cheap and easy to produce petroleum. The postmodern city, facing the end of cheap and abundant oil, is now dependent from this finite resource. To minimize the dependency from hydrocarbon energy it is necessary to increase urban density, to switch to renewable energy production and to create new spaces for multifunctional purposes. An essential problem of urban agglomeration, though, is the fact that distances between food production and consumption have increased drastically in the last fifty years. Cheap oil made it possible to implement a global food transportation
network and it also supported intensive monocultural food production. Today’s food no more gets bought from local markets, but from labels. Its value is dependent from the brand-image, represented from the tertiary sector. The end of cheap fossil fuels carries a huge potential for architects and urban planners—we can move away from representing abstract, non-spatial processes and identities but creating spaces for dynamic local interactions. A promising typus for this might be the Vertical Farm.

Keywords

Vertical Farming; Energy Production; Energy Efficiency; Water Security

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare no conflicts of interest.

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