THE PROPERTY DEVELOPMENT REVIEW
“Design can accommodate agriculture but the operation of these spaces fail to work if there is not some way to ensure access, upkeep, maintenance [and so on].” Management issues have caused earlier projects to invest in communal garden or high-density farming projects. Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market garden, for instance, aimed to provide a functioning greenhouse with crops and aquaponic systems but resistance from stakeholders prevented it moving further.
Rooftop Republic is an urban farming company that has developed agricultural projects on top of major buildings, including Hong Kong’s Bank of America skyscrape r.
International examples can light the way, with large-scale greenhouse production in the Netherlands and Spain, and in Asia and the US, brownfield sites within metropolitan areas provide space for large-scale sheds. From a pragmatic point of view, developers in need of a point of differentiation can utilise shared community gardens as a marketing tool, and in other countries, agricultural elements to developments have been gamechangers in planning. “We can learn from Europe where the EU is exploring policy and incentives to allow for small-scale food production to occur in cities,” Doyle says. “We could look to this approach as a way of supporting and strengthening what is already happening and ensuring that as the city densifies that the characteristics of the Australian suburb are not erased.”
Melbourne’s Skyfarm turned a 2000sq m rooftop carpark into an urban farm.
There are also structural concerns, especially for communal gardens in high-rise buildings. “Where soil and water is involved, there is cost and complexity in building gardens into building structures,” Doyle says. “Often roof gardens can lead to water ingress issues and will need to be frequently maintained. Wet soil is heavy and consequently requires a large amount of structural support, which can drive cost.” But even though it might not immediately add up, as is the case with vertical farming, there is the opportunity at this early stage in Australia’s urban agriculture journey to shape the future. “In some cases developers can receive financial or yield incentives for including green space in their proposal,” Doyle says. “We’re super interested in the challenges of including farming in high- density urban environments precisely because of the difficulty. “From what I’ve seen in Australia it hasn’t been considered properly yet, which means there is the opportunity to shape policy.” Across the globe While food security is not necessarily an immediate concern in Australia given that we are a net exporter of food, urban agriculture can connect consumers with food sources and help to take advantage of ‘leftover’ space in cityscapes. “Food production spaces can be added to leftover spaces in buildings not appropriate for habitable areas—this is particularly useful for adaptive reuse projects,” Doyle says. “We completed a project in 2017 looking at the adaptive reuse of carpark spaces in Hong Kong into vertical farming—I see this idea has since been taken up by a few people in Melbourne. “A similar idea could be applied to the retrofit of commercial buildings into apartments—rather than having deep apartments with no natural light, as was the case with commercial tower adaptations in the 1990s, the centre of a commercial floorplate could accommodate food production, allowing the apartments to be thinner and concentrated around the perimeter of the floor plate.”
Chickahominy Falls, an over-55s ‘agri-community’ in the US state of Virginia, includes a 10-acre, professionally managed farm.
This becomes more important as Australian cities reach their sprawl limits. “We are facing dual challenges of decarbonisation and housing affordability,” Doyle says. “These challenges will mean our cities will need to be consolidated. An outcome of this could be an increased desire for the kinds of amenities we enjoyed in the traditional suburb—such as small scale agriculture— appearing in high-density developments. “Agriculture spaces can be a way of creating developments that are enjoyable to live in, and provide for connected communities.”
April / May 2024 – 13
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