REPURPOSED VERTICAL FARMS: adaptive building reuse for vertical urban agriculture

"Rising food prices and the increasingly mainstream local and organic food movements are increasing the popularity of urban farming. While many of these take place on ground level in vacant lots or appropriated parkland, existing buildings provide a new frontier for growing food within the city. In shrinking post-industrial cities, large swathes of buildings have been abandoned that lend themselves to new uses as vertical urban farms. In denser and growing cities, appropriating buildings that are structurally sound but no longer useful for their intended purpose, or rooftops and balconies on functioning buildings, can provide hyper-local food using a minimum of space. The following case studies examine three existing buildings that have been re-purposed into functioning urban farms: The Brooklyn Grange (New York), The Plant (Chigago), and Farm:Shop (London). By providing a variety of urban contexts, scales, technologies, and modes of production, this project seeks to become a productive catalog of adaptive reuse for urban agriculture."