People continue to be drawn to cities by the economic, social and creative opportunities they offer; large cities are more productive than rural areas, producing more patents and yielding higher returns on capital. However, urbanization also presents major challenges. The world’s fastest-growing cities have seen problems adjusting to growth and industrialization, choking under the burden of pollution, congestion and urban poverty. In Metro Manila we suffer from these effects on a daily basis.
Urban settings magnify global threats, such as climate change (I am glad to see that almost three-fourths of the US do not share the decision of Trump and will continue to implement climate-change options), water and food security and resource shortages, but also provide a framework for addressing them. If the future of cities cannot be one of unsustainable expansion, it should rather be one of tireless innovation.
The World Economic Forum (WEF) came up with 10 Top Urban Innovations:
- (Digitally) Re-Programmable Space
- Waternet: An Internet of Pipes
- Adopt a Tree through Your Social Network
- Augmented Humans: The Next Generation of Mobility
- Co-Co-Co: Co-generating, Co-heating, Co-cooling
- The Sharing City: Unleashing Spare Capacity
- Mobility-on-Demand
- Medellin Revisited: Infrastructure for Social Integration
- Smart Array: Intelligent Street Poles as a Platform for Urban Sensing
- Urban Farming: Vertical Vegetables.
Many of these solutions are scalable, replicable and can be adapted to a variety of specific urban environments. Some are possible only due to new technologies, while others apply technology to ideas that are as old as the city itself.
Let me focus on Urban Farming today, an innovative urban approach today, also in Manila:
The UN predicts the world’s population will reach 9 billion by 2050, most of this extra 2 billion will live in cities. Feeding all these new urban residents is going to require a complete rethink of the global food system. The current system is hugely wasteful. The Ellen McArthur Foundation found that 45 percent of perishable vegetables grown in Europe are wasted before they reach the table, much of this is due to long and inefficient supply chains. Supply-chain management is an area that we have to address in the Philippines also; I have already written about it and made suggestions.
A simple way to cut a lot of waste out of the system is to move the farm. The roofs of buildings and even the walls can use soil-less, hydroponic systems to grow food right on the consumer’s doorstep. Hydroponic systems feed nutrients straight to the roots, using up to 10 times less water than traditional means. Advances in LED lights, which are now highly efficient and emit specific wavelengths for plant growth, mean that urban farms can be inside and stacked. Systems, such as Aero Farms, stack multiple trays of veggies, yielding up to 100 times more per square meter than traditional farms.
Other companies, such as Freight Farms, upcycle shipping containers, delivering a plug and play fully working urban farm all controlled from your smartphone. They can be placed in redundant space such as car parks and stacked, instantly scaling urban food production. Aquaponic systems used by companies such as Sky Greens take the waste products of fish farms to fertilize the plants, turning fish food into carp and lettuce. In the original design for London, an area of farmland was preserved around this city. This “green belt” was conceived as a way to preserve nature while ensuring food security for the burgeoning metropolis. The new wave of urban farming can be seen as a new vertical green belt feeding the populous while also bringing nature to the city center.
While we are studying these approaches and evaluate which make sense for Metro Manila, we are presently more focused on using under- and un-utilized land areas in the various cities of Metro Manila and try to make them productive to feed the street dwellers and deliver vegetables to the hotels and restaurants in the neighbourhood. We finally signed a memorandum of understanding with the Department of Social Welfare and Development on June 5 and get closer to the implementation of our ideas. Our initial targets will be Quezon City and Antipolo.
If you want to join our endeavours, contact Schumacher@mca.com.ph
1 comment
These technologies are very advanced and may have proven worthwhile for highly urbanized cities in advanced economies but for the Philippines which is basically an agricultural country we may be more inclined to follow the lead of Cuba and Israel. What we need is regenerative agriculture and bee farms to maintain the ecological balance in the country. The Ginza Bee Project in Tokyo proved to be sustainable and profitable while urban container farming can be maximized by using aquaponics. Rooftops of buildings in Metro Manila can have plant nurseries, small gardens and even bee farms can be adopted. We have plenty of soil and sunlight and rain all we need is to liberate the marginalized rural agricultural sectors with equitable land distribution with easy access to credit, technology and market.