“Cities create things, consume them and produce their by-product which we call waste. The efficient functioning of a city depends on its ability to deal with this waste. In our economy the patterns of production, consumption and waste management are global, but the effects are localised.” - Studio 12 brief and results.

Window Farms are vertical, hydroponic, modular, low-energy, high-yield edible window gardens built using low-impact or recycled local materials.

Decades from now 2009 may be seen as the year that vertical farming started to take hold. Time magazine named vertical farming one of last year’s 50 best inventions. Proposals seemed to arrive almost weekly. Andwhole blogs — or parts thereof — are devoting themselves to the subject.

The push for more sustainable and less land-devouring, transportation-heavy, soil-depleting, ground-water-polluting practices of agriculture ranges from systems that fit inside buildings to skyscrapers devoted in their entirety to food production. The former is more immediate and realistic, while the latter’s proposals are still in the realm of ideas and fantasy, at least on the large scale many envision them. Spurred by a recent Scientific American article — penned by a Dickson Despommier, a vocal proponent of vertical farming and the president of the Vertical Farm Project — I explored to see what forms these hypothetical vertical farms may take, and how they integrate with other functions to create a true urban agriculture, not just monocultural functionalism akin to agribusiness supplanted to the city.