Sara Khorshidifard, PhD, Bowling Green State University

ABSTRACT

Intersections of food and the built environment make an imperative prospective for Environmental Design Research, the two areas between which design can support stronger allyships. This paper evaluates the past and present of this connection to initiate a synthesis on future possibilities of architecture-integrated ecological foodways. Food insecurity today is an acute global challenge, tightly intertwined with such other challenges as climate change, resource scarcity, and rapid urbanization. Project Drawdown 2017 reports the agriculture and food sectors posing largest negative bearings on climate change. Unsustainable practices in food production, distribution, waste, diet, and holistic grazing are responsible for around 8% of global emissions, and just the food waste reduction is ranked third in reducing overall CO2 emissions. Environmental design research, development, and education engaging ecological foodways is a timely subject. Design assimilating sustainable food systems is a timely tool for advocacy, simultaneously enabling by tackling the unsustainability of food systems and wicked problem of food insecurity. Sustainable foodways integrated in built environments are not new concepts. In fact, historically, buildings and food systems were more robustly entangled. This is evidenced plenteously by how vernacular structures from ancient cultures embedded passive solutions serving food production, procurement, preservation, and processing. Taking one culture, for instance: numerous of such cases are perceived in the Iranian plateau in vernacular structures like Qanat, Asbad (windmill), Badgir (windcatcher), Sardab (cool courtyard house cellar), and Yakhchal (evaporative cooler). Today, the two fundamentals of human life, food and shelter can succeed as less discrete and more integrated. Despite needs for stronger integrations, traced to the arrival of modern refrigeration, the previous, more close-nit interactions in the vernacular have been lost. Into the future, ecological design mergers with effective foodways can help mitigate some of the insecurities and enhance fairness in current food systems, after all, framing food sovereignty as a sustainable chain for all. In addition, putting foodways near to where people live can reduce transportation needs, costs, and future soil degradations. Low-tech integrations of the past are still educative for the present and future of our techno-digital era. More are still to be learned from the vernacular ethos: environmentally adaptability, grounding in local needs and material availability, and reflecting local traditions. Beginning with the analyses of the past and the present, the paper will devise a systematic applicability thinking into the future. Outcomes aim at unifying strategies as edifying tangible and intangible measures coalescing social impact design with historical building practices. Architecture, then, can act as that resource-efficient ecological container for reducing food waste, enhancing food safety, increasing food security, and educating to make eating healthy easier.

KEY WORDS: Vernacular Architecture; Persian Culture; Food Production, Procurement, Preservation, and Processing; Food Insecurity; Food Deserts

Introduction

Focusing on intersection of food and the built environment, this paper conveys additional perspectives regarding their stronger allyships. Designs assimilating sustainable foodways¹ become tool for advocacy, tackling problems of food insecurity and food desert conditions. Historically, food and architecture were more robustly connected. Evident from vernacular precedents in various cultures, passive systems of food production, procurement, preservation, and processing had long been embedded in architectures. Plenteous integrated solutions detectable in early cultures since antiquity particularly manifest passive cooling used for food preservation.² Mainly with the advent of modern refrigeration the dynamics have changed, replacing the passive with energy-intensive active systems.³

Food and architecture splits are today greater than their connections. Since refrigerators have separated essential food systems from shelter needs, foodways became addendums functioning in separation, no longer residing as integral parts of architectural systems. Acknowledging the ingenuity of passive options, however, is not asserting their total sufficiency for modern lifestyles. Active ways remain indispensable for maintaining perishables, slowing down bacteria growth and avoiding foodborne infections. Nevertheless, more critical, system-thinking learnings are still possible, reviving interests in the art and science of the vernacular to lead better integrations of foodways in the built environment.

Food, architecture, and urbanism if brought closer together with symbiotic connections can offer more effective, integrative ways out of some the most acute issues people are facing locally and globally such as food insecurity. Food systems and choices are heavily factored in climate change, impacting greenhouse emissions. Refrigeration and air conditioning energy demands alone are known to take up about 20% of overall energy consumptions (Kitanovski, Plaznik, Tomc & Poredoš, 2015, p. 289). Project Drawdown report offers a comprehensive plan to reverse global warming where food is key consideration (Hawken, 2017, pp. 38-74).⁴

With more impetus for creating and maintaining local food production in the recent decade, farmer markets, fresh produce stores, and community gardens within small and large-scale projects gained momentum. Having played a key part in recent shifts is a “Good Food Revolution (Allen & Wilson, 2013).” This is opening up ways to grow healthy food, people and communities, and bringing food production beyond just the conventional farms and closer to cities and towns. At the neighborhood scale, questions are raises and solutions are convened regarding design and social innovation for proximate, responsibly-sourced and healthier local food bases.⁵ According to the American Nutrition Association’s 2009 study, 23.5 million Americans living in food deserts with no to limited access to fresh fruit and vegetables. Housing locations and qualities have overall impacts on food access, largely affecting people’s health and wellbeing.

At the architectural scale, urbanized futures are imagined in part through scientific, engineering-blended design integrations, for instance, in the sub-field of Building-Integrated Agriculture. Simulation-based studies investigate energy-efficient food production in and around architectures, in balconies, interior hothouse gardens, and on rooftops in low, medium, and high-rise structures (Benis, Reinhart, & Ferrão, 2017; Gould & Caplow, 2012; Astee, & Kishnani, 2010; Puri & Caplow, 2009; Caplow, 2009). Beyond the production, food preservation, preparation, recycling, and composting discussions are facilitated by better physical arrangements, designed kitchens, and work and storage spaces. Additionally, suitability of dining spaces interacting with lighting, air, and furniture arrangements prompts further stress-free settings for healthier food consumption and digestion.

Environment Design Research is well positioned to target global food insecurity as a “wicked problem (Grochowska, 2014; Hamann, Giamporcaro, Johnston, & Yachkaschi, 2011).”⁶ Early aim must discourse ways of bringing food and shelter closer together, again: food closer to the city and foodways integrated in architecture. Food more meaningfully connected, and inclusive and efficient integrations of its systems and practices in the built environment can have positive impacts on building healthy places and reshaping new spaces for urbanization. How can the built environment aim better at addressing the design of spaces as they are also explicitly impacting nutritive productions and facilitating edible accessibility? What are some ways that urban, nonurban, and all their interface spaces could practice self-sufficiency and food sovereignty? How can the built environment help grow more effective local and regional agriculture networks? The paper content is driven by these questions.

Towards an Architecture for Food Security

Issues faced by communities worldwide are as varied as reasons causing them, most basic being clean air and water, and food.⁷ Hunger, malnutrition, and food desert conditions are important Social Determinants of Health (Wilkinson & Marmot, 2003). Architecture, too, can/should lead on the issues by prioritizing food security and foodway interventions as part of design questions. Towards the architecture for social good to bridge social resilience, cultural placemaking, and equity, stronger associations are needed between food and space beyond a simple inclusion of just edible outcomes. Designs can additionally engage integrative solutions around the entire system of practices surrounding food and eating, ones better entrenched in the design of the built environment and not distinct from it. Integrative foodways must engage all elements, of food production, procurement, preservation, preparation, presentation, consumption, cleanup, and disposal. Furthermore, the engagement should take place not only in the urban, but also in all ranges including with rural deign (Thorbeck, 2013).⁸

Raisons d'être do not fall short considering better, new ways to reconnect food and architecture. Unsustainability of the current global food system is wicked problem requiring wicked good solutions (Waddock, 2013),”⁹ which design can aim to address. Part of today’s realities derives from industrialized agriculture, a byproduct of the Green Revolution as aftermath of World War II, which, despite originally positive intentions, has since moved to extremes.¹⁰ Current world populations of 7.3 billion are expected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050, estimating 80% residing in urban centers (UN, 2015). Demographic projections demand growths in agricultural productions to feed populations. In addition to reduced rural workforce and needs for bioenergy and sustainable markets adaptable to climate change, limits of remaining arable lands, stringent resource constraints and slowdown in yields growth are bigger concerns (Alexandratos and Bruinsma, 2012, p. 8).¹¹ Traditional farming practices are not sustainable and, if continued, a projected 10 hectares of new land would be needed to grow enough food to feed growing populations (Despommier, 2010).¹² The messy and complex problem that is not clearly demarcating where and how solutions need to move forward presents itself as a seamless design problem, and the unsustainability makes alternative farming essential to smarter future cities and feeding the world.

Extent of Presence; Scope of Absence

Food and place intersect in a variety of ways including the productive landscapes, convivial foodscapes, and sustainability alignments. Spatial dimensions of food are already built in within discourses of urbanism, urban design, and planning, many also engaging diverse roles of urban agriculture in the future of food distribution and accessibility (Parham, 2015, 2013, & 2005; Viljoen & Bohn, 2014; Viljoen, & Wiskerke, 2012; Viljoen & Howe, 2012; Bohn & Viljoen, 2011; Frank, 2005; Viljoen and Wiskerke, 2012; Bell and Binnie, 2005; Holdsworth, 2005). Food and place junctures are present at multiple scales from private dining tables and kitchen hearths, to geographies of city grids, neighborhoods and global expanse.

With more people living in urban communities, shifting concepts of urbanization bring new light to food-space connections. Living in transforming places, as Parham (2015) puts, demands new considerations for food in shaping contemporary spaces. How and where food is grown, transported, purchased, prepared, consumed, cleaned up, and disposed play parts in creating sustainable, resilient, and convivial future urbanizations. The wide-ranging presence demands that solutions also impact at multiple scales with a whole-system approach, “each scale nesting into the other (p. 2).” System thinking is essential to transform the unsustainability of current food regimes with more resilient food urbanism solutions. As Calthrope (2015) puts, this involves thinking as broad as the number of miles we drive, the kinds of food we eat, or the kinds of homes we build (p. 9).

Food insecurity being a major social problem at global scale has been hunting both urban and nonurban populations in both developed and developing countries (America, 2016; FAO, IFAD, & WFP, 2015; Burton et al, 2013).¹³ Large populations live in food desert conditions in remote rural and inner urban communities that lack proper and proximate access to healthy and affordable food (Morris et al., 2019; De Master & Daniels, 2019; Morton & Blanchard, 2007).¹⁴ Due to larger populations, inner cities are more susceptible to food shock triggers and interruptions in normal food supply flows. Any urban-rural continuums space, nevertheless, can easily face the hardship with any fuel supply deficiency, natural disasters, or outbreaks blocking access. Supermarkets often only project illusions of abundance; in reality, their efficient supply-chain models can only retain a few-day worth of food reserves at any given time (Cockrall-King, 2012, p. 29; Boycott, 2008, pp. 27-31). With shelves conceivably emptied out within days with any event blocking food access, urban agriculture is practical solution.

Most contemporary cities have not been properly built around better food accessibility, which could in the future. Broad discussions from early 1990s on “Food Miles” to more recent with Project Drawdown have highlighted broader negative transportation implications.¹⁵ Considering the miles edibles have to travel, with amounts of fuel energy used and carbon dioxide left behind, foodways designed closest to urbanizations, closer to where people live frame a sensible choice. With regards to ecological attitudes and local and regional networks, environmental design can also involve the everyday placemaking capacities of food as related to its spatial, social and cultural practices. Places designed around food are central to everyday social practices of human experience as described by Lefebvre’s lived space (1991),¹⁶ De Certeau (1984), and Debord (1981). A pressing issue of mankind today is to merge urban expansion and food production (Gren and Andersson, 2018, p. 75). The merger remains central to questions on futures of food security in rapidly urbanizing societies.

EcoFoodway Architectures

Food deserts and insecurities are derivatives of rapid urbanization and poverty that design can more intentionally and systematically tackle by growing food inside city fabrics and indoors, in or on top of buildings. With growing populations, three more billion by 2050 (Nations, 2015), and limited resources, traditional agricultural practices are unsuitable. The alternative brings food closer to end users by integrating foodways as parts of architectural systems. Not a new concept, urban agriculture has been around since the Green Revolution. Speculative integrations also manifested in early utopian schemes such as the post-war Japanese architectural movement Metabolism, projecting some of the most thought-provoking agricultural utopias (Figure 1). The alternative constitutions blended ecological metaphors and organic growth with megastructures and high-tech design vocabularies, as Lin (2016) put, valiant aspirations by futurist architectural images and debates incurring by the ideas (p. 620).

Figure 1

Agricultural City by the Metabolist Architect, Kisho Kurokawa in the 1960 reflects a modern, high-density urbanization reconfiguration that is intentionally bringing the rural landscape into urban living. Mega living structures represent mushroom-shaped houses elevated above concrete slabs. Positioning on a made grid and elevating over the agricultural soil enable living realms to breed their own food production facilities just beneath and self-sustain.¹⁷

Outward expressions of human imagination similar to Metabolists’ have continued enthusing ambitious speculations merging urban expansion and food production. Edible insertions and utopian agricultural conceptualizations ensued in numerous schemes such as the Utopia, Garden Cities of To-Morrow, Radiant City, Broadacre City, New Regional Pattern, Archipelago City, and Agronica, naming a few.¹⁸ Open-air urban agriculture as land use type now occurs more frequently in towns and cities around the world. Value Farm project, for instance, implemented in Shenzhen, China is intersecting urban transformation with foodway integrations and urban farming in support of community (Figure 2). Urban gardens in the United States trace down to the 1890s Relief Gardens, early ones starting in Detroit¹⁹ during 1893 economic crisis that, sponsored by governmental and philanthropic institutions, addressed economic downturn and war-related needs (Kurtz, 2001; Hynes, 1996; Bassett, 1981; Warner, 1987).

Figure 2

Designed by Thomas Chung and completed in 2013, Value Farm is a 100-square-meter episodic architecture combined with urban agriculture. Located in a post-industrial leftover site, the open space that was a former glass factory is now transformed into a regenerative, food-productive landscape infrastructure housing edible plants, aiming for community building with farming in the city. Courtesy of Value Farm/Thomas Chung.

The Community Garden movement since the 1970s is an extension of different past forms of gardens (Figure 3). European cities pre-date the US in their urban vacant lot gardens (Figure 3). Allotment Gardens ²⁰ originated to respond to land privatization in urban areas (Brunel, 2003, pp. 195-212) that presented many socio-cultural and economic benefits to local communities (Saunders, 1993).²¹ Dating back to the First or Second World War, in times of extreme crisis, the Liberty, Victory and Relief Gardens in the United States provided majority of consumed essential fruits and vegetables (Lawson, 2004, p. 162). Interest in similar urban community gardens has revived since the Green Revolution, now more common and widely valued in urban landscapes. Community gardens remain central with global food securities at risk, involving ideas such as small plot intensive using SPIN farming models, as well as rooftop, greenhouse and vertical farming indoors. Differences subsist in design and format, on whether they are likewise providing other hybrid functionalities such as children play or food provision working areas. Overall, the design can have “important implications for how social relationships are formed around the nexus of the garden (Kurtz, 2001, p. 661).”²²

Figure 3

(Top) Naerum Allotment Gardens, designed by Carl Sorensen in Denmark in the 1950s, are blends between topography and landscape. Source: goodshomedesign.com).²³

(Bottom) The ABC of Victory Gardens Pamphlet, published in 1943 by USDA, taught Americans how to grow their own food. Source: Ohio Historical Society, Ohio History Connection Selection.²⁴

Learning from the Vernacular

Despite the elaborated urgency and stronger presence on urban grounds, ecological integrations of food systems into buildings are not today much deep-rooted. Comparative to vernacular architectures traceable from past cultures, much of the previous close-nit interactions of food and architecture seem to have been lost. This is mainly attributable to the arrival of mechanical systems, specially, active refrigeration. Convenience of applying energy-intensive processes has since downplayed ecological benefits of fossil fuel-independent solutions, systems tightly embedded in and integrated with the brick and mortar of architecture. Seeing the problem in front of us, foreseeing more food scarcity issues coming into the future, architectural design down to source of form benefits from opening up. One way is to work more collaboratively with what and how outcomes were historically achieved when buildings and foodways were more vigorously entangled akin to unified systems.

Learnings from vernacular system-thinking bring more understandings to foodways closer to architecture. Indications are found in numerous cultures where keen passive solutions were simultaneously handling various food cycles of production, procurement, preservation, and processing. Cultural landscapes of the Iranian plateau, for instance, are filled with examples of Qanats, Asbads (windmills), Badgirs (windcatcher), Sardabs (cool indoors cellar in courtyard house), and Yakhchals (evaporative cooler). Qanats as historic heritage sites offered an effective sustainable system for supplying water mainly in arid regions.²⁵ Sloped underground aqueduct forms supplied irrigation and drinking waters for agriculture and living settlements. Man-made gravity-driven canals could carry water from alluvial aquifers into deep wells as series of vertical access shafts, often, over many kilometers. Badgirs are also historic structures used for passive air-conditioning since antiquity (A’zami, 2005; Bahadori, 1978; O’Kane, 1976; Badawy, 1958). Manifesting regional variations, the system traps and channels prevailing wind in outlets on building roof, and directs them down to cool and ventilate rooms below. The ventilation wind towers and water channels were consorted in Sardabs, the coolest locations of courtyard houses where essential perishable edibles such as grains, fruits, and herbs were stored (Figure 4).²⁶

Figure 4

(Left) Sardab was often interconnected with natural cooling from Qanat (Drawing Source: Beazley & Harverson, 1982, p. 69).²⁷

(Right) Typical section of Qanat (Drawing Source: Shamaeezadeh, 2015, p. 2).

Prior to freezers, in colder climates, ice and snow were piled in man-made icehouses for use, also for food preservation throughout the year. Ancient ice-pits, however, in hot-arid climates can perhaps even with today standards be considered as the most mastermind of architecture-embedded solutions for food preservations. Ancient peoples were able to make ice in desert climates, an evidence being the phenomenon of Iranian Yakhchals as essential ice repositories, also vastly studied (Pochee, Gunstone, & Wilton, 2017; Hosseini & Namazian, 2012; Maleki, 2011; Okhovat, Almasifar, & Bemanian, 2011; Ghobadian, 1998; Mokhlesi, 1985; Beazley, 1977).²⁸ These indigenous foodway architectures, many still standing to date, excellently used an effect called night sky radiant cooling or radiative cooling as the process by which water could lose heat through thermal radiation. The system used aboveground evaporative cooling combined with buried underground storage with highly-insulated thermal mass.²⁹ During evenings, water was dispensed in pool, allowed for overnight freezing. Remarkably, the icing was achieved when the air temperature was still above freezing. In addition to evaporation playing key part, the more important cooling effect, as TED speaker Aaswath Raman (2018) also elucidates, was due to the concept of thermal radiation: the pool of water like other natural materials could send its heat as light upwards towards, eventually, escaping into the colder atmosphere. (Figure 5).

Figure 5

The Yakhchal system was used for year-round food and ice preservation, often connected with Qanat and Badgir for further lowering the temperature (Maleki, 2011, p. 89).

(Left) Shading walls in two examples (Drawing Source: Mokhlesi, 1985)

(Right) Yakhchal of Meibod (Drawing Source: Ghobadian, 2001, In: Hosseini & Namazian, 2012, pp. 226-227).

Another of notable ancient foodways were the vertical-axis windmills known as Asbads. These simple factories were crucial in sustaining community livelihood and providing local residents food sovereignty for fulfilling daily needs. Dedicated mainly to the processing and grinding of grains, the system had artfully as well as scientifically fused local assets and the clean renewable wind energy with the architecture (Mahdavinejad, Bemanian & Mashayekhi, 2012; Saeidian, Gholi, & Zamani, 2012; Khezri & Imani, 2009; Petherbridge, 1995; Shepherd, 1990; Beazley, & Harverson, 1982; Wulff, 1966). Asbads were particularly common in the eastern regions of Iran with copious and constant winds in certain directions. Some are still in existence today and a few are still in operation mostly as touristic landmarks. With regionally-based typologies, Asbads slightly differed based on local material and available wind speeds. The sites were often positioned outside of residential boroughs and structures were typically built with native wood, mud brick, and kahgel as a mix of clay and straw. (Figure 6).

Culturally-broad looks at global ranges of recorded vernacular structures show prevalence of passive energy usage, and examples are many. Refined windmill technologies were used in the Netherlands for cleaning up marshes and water bodies, a technology that was later adopted in America to pump water in farms (Wolff, 1992). Everyday clay structures found in houses from the Late Neolithic Vinča culture in Stubline near Serbia’s capital assisted with activities related to food storing, processing and dining structures (Spasić & Živanović, 2015). The objects were important both as survival strategies and as complex symbolic practices conceptualizing social spaces. Today, attempts in sustainability education would be incomplete without solid knowledge on the vernacular and its capacities of applied passive solutions. Above and beyond cultural heritage and conservation aspects are evidence-based and scientific key learnings that design can better draw on. Better design must consider the vernacular structures’ common sense and intelligible system-thinking attributes as worthy and valuable achievements deserving more serious assimilations in environmental design and research.

Figure 6

A typical Asbad structure had two stories. The top was parkhane where blades were housed and the bottom was askhaneh for retaining the millstone, all combined with charkhbad that was the wind round or disk area.

The drawings show an Asbad structure and layout based on the mills documented in Nistafun in 1977 (Drawing Source: Beazley, & Harverson, 1982, Living with the desert, p. 89).

Building Integrated Agriculture and Beyond

Evaluating the past and present is key to the synthesis of future foodway architectures. Today, scientific studies in Building Integrated Agriculture offer diverse contributions (Caplow, 2009; Puri & Caplow, 2009; Caplow, & Nelkin, 2007).³⁰ Outcomes are drawn from concerted efforts between the built environment and agricultural technologies such as more efficient water use, waste management cycles, and building-integrated renewable energy sources (Benis, Reinhart and Ferrão, 2017). Research is prevalent on rooftop greenhouse and vertical farming experiments adopting soilless cultures such as aeroponics, hydroponic, and aquaponics. These cultivation methods are recognized to be efficient in not only using less land and requiring around ten times less water resources than the conventional, but also leading significantly higher yields in smaller areas (Barbosa et al., 2015). Rooftops bestow substantial unutilized urban extents on which lightweight greenhouses do not also demand significant structural reinforcement. Overall, crops growing indoors in multistory buildings, new and abandoned, require less energy, occupy less land, and generate less emission, compared to some conventional cultivation methods in natural landscapes (Despommier, 2010). Due to the advantages, vertical farming has become more prevalent more rapidly over the past decade, expressly, involving aquaponics growing, a technique also very popular at indoors of reused industrial buildings in many urban areas.³¹ Efficiencies conferred include a 70-95% less water demand than open crop farms, more crop yields year-round and less CO₂ emissions, along with pesticide, herbicide, and fertilizer-free rearing (Graamans et al., 2018; Benke & Tomkins, 2017; Barbosa et al., 2015; Despommier, 2010).

Advancing solutions for food-resilient futures by battling land scarcities and food desert conditions can in part be realized through intensive applications of dense indoor farming in the city. Urban agriculture not only helps bring urban renewal, but also repair natural ecosystems forfeited by excessive industrialized farming. Year-round food production in controlled environments using non-toxic supplies generates more predictive and dependable food sources, specially, in areas demarcated as food deserts. Implanted cases bringing food to hearts of desolated neighborhoods are detectable in the American Midwest: The Plant in Chicago, Growing Power in Milwaukee, and Hantz Farms in Detroit, naming few. The Plant is particularly unique, housing vertical farming in previously dilapidated, now adaptively-reused warehouse setting, while having considered embodied energy conservation in reconstruction.³²

Adaptive reuse is a competent lens for integrating urban agriculture in architecture. It offers optimistic impact possibilities both functionally, in terms of preservation and sustainable environments, and visually, by using stylistic combinations of new and old architectures retaining authentic characters. This can achieve, alongside possibilities for revitalizing structures and communities, socially-meaningful and economically-equitable new uses for alleviating food insecurity.

Conclusion

Adaptive reuse of existing buildings integrating key learnings from the vernacular is not far from achievable. The enormous vacancies available are assets found in abundance in numerous post-industrial cities including in the American Rust Belt. Material extraction for new construction can still have large environmental impact particularly if done for the sole purpose of agricultural production. Considering that, however, adaptive reuse of available underutilized buildings as foodways through proper energy retrofitting will be extremely advantageous. Applying BIA techniques in adaptive reuse combined with learnings from passive solutions is well suited into the future. The combination must join efforts with architectural design thinking to theorize innovative and positive roles for alternative urban agriculture. Renewed interests in the insertion and the architectural integrations can inform the future visions for food distribution and accessibility in urban-rural continuums.

Abundant vacant buildings and leftover urban sites make suitable contexts for experimentations, likewise tackling food insecurity in local neighborhoods where most needed. Large-scale warehouses make seamless opportunities for original vertical farming models: sophisticated architecture-integrated ecological systems as indoor plant factories for efficient and quality food production. Along the benefits, challenges are also detected in urban agriculture. A first is a rather limited palette of suitable crop range, normally, only vegetables being harvested, and not much of grains or other essential palatable items. A second important challenge is the production quantities that are typically not high enough in not-for-profit business models. This becomes important when a key aim is producing as sufficient as to serve larger food-insecure populations residing in food deserts. In most successful for-profit models, the produce could be valued with extravagant prices, catering only to high-end markets and pricy restaurants. Business efficiency is needed to make urban farming affordable to serve disadvantaged populations. A third challenge is with how productions even inside newly-built and fully-controlled greenhouse environments could be disproportionate in terms of essential sunlight exposure. Varied coverages can make growing less predictable; plants on top levels benefit from more solar radiation and photovoltaic supplies could be inadequate with restricted stacking options.

To scale up foodway integrations in cities, clean renewable energies, resource considerations, reduced waste and transportation are essentials for realizing ultimate anticipated environmental benefits (Mohareb et al., 2017; Cox, 2016; Despommier, 2010). Light is a main issue; although sunlight replacement with LEDs is possible, the use of electricity is still high. Scaling up production in indoor, climate-controlled plant factories demands explicit considerations of both difficulties and benefits of renewable energy implementations and waste recycling. To do so, innovative and hybridized combinations of the high-tech active and low-tech passive solutions as learned from age-old vernacular structures pave a way; passive complementary pieces advancing available technologies.

This area of environmental design research will help address unsustainability of food systems in the city and beyond through architectural design thinking and development. Combined with enhanced STEM training and collaboration, ecological architecture is informed to more effectually assimilate passive, active, and hybrid venues in house as food production, storing, processing, distributing, recycling spaces. Although need for food production is drawn with further urgency today, needs go beyond just production, becoming more critical in areas such as food waste and ways of reaching end users, mainly, in-need populations. Architecture then becomes a key container to address all essential areas by sponsoring ecological food systems towards a more sustainable future. Composed in the city, EcoFoodway Architectures create what Steel (2013) once called: a “sitopia,” food-place harnessing potential to shape the world in a better way.