Effective Food: Design and Urban Agriculture in the Post Carbon City

Urban agriculture has the potential to unlock new content and form in the new programmatic and spatial dynamics of the post carbon city. It will be one defined by new use of post-industrial and post-retail buildings and sites. We propose the growth and engagement with urban agriculture as a way of creating new ecological and sustainable futures. Through the design of a technical food system in the urban context of Belfast, the paper demonstrates how local food production can reduce food miles, limit packaging and waste, thereby optimising food, energy and water (FEW) resources use while offering new possibilities for how residents live, work and access food. Firstly, the paper analyses the impact of residents’ food consumption by quantifying land use for production and the area of forest to sequester full lifecycle carbon emissions, called the ‘foodprint’. Secondly, the paper examines how efficient the integration of a technical food system in the city is in reducing the ecological footprint of food consumption. The paper finds that urban agriculture is effective rather than efficient. The importance of food production rests in the opportunities it creates in fostering new economic, social and cultural opportunities while enhancing ideas related to the circular economy, reduce waste and make visible the provenance of food.