Archi-Culture or Agri-Tecture: The Garden in The Machine
Since the late 19th century, Urban Agriculture has served its respective context in more ways than just food production. The Urban farm became the center of community, essential democratic space where neighbors from all walks of life could share stories, recipes, farming practices and resources with one another. Tackling a main aspect of a people’s basic needs, urban farms and the sharing of agriculture is an essential act of selfreliance, self-preservation, and resistance. Planting their identities into the earth, this urban landscape has also become a reflection of culture, passing of tradition, and a connection to a homeland some immigrants could not get back to, but through native culinary practices and the ability to grow foods of familiarity, people have been able to carry their history with them. In this sense, on a small scale the community garden has become a central node of urban civic exchange. On the precipice of exponential growth, the necessity for urban grow space has never been more pressing. Moving beyond our typical urban agriculture typologies, the implementation of year-round growth can and has proven to expand the output of existing urban land already dedicated to closing the gap between where we grow our food and where we need it most. Interior urban growth spaces have recently been on the rise but have been typically implemented under the currently limited typology that is the standard ready-made greenhouse or the hyper productive food lab. Both missing the essence of what made urban agriculture different from rural, the people. This essential ethos that has been baked into the urban farm has not yet translated into the urban greenhouse, a largely generic structure that has provided farmers and communities the opportunity to increase crop yield and expand operations beyond their normal seasons. A key innovation, as food security within urban contexts becomes a more prevalent issue, but this expansion of production has come at the expense of the atmosphere that has made the urban farm what it is, the legibility of authorship, of collaboration, of identity. The greenhouse kit is a generic solution, cheap, easy to construct and pre-engineered, making it the obvious choice for more grassroots efforts that urban agricultural endeavors tend to be. But can we take a greenhouse kit that exists everywhere and develop a reconstruction so that it reacts to the constraints of its location? What can it hold to take on the dual identity of the garden? If we are going to move the greenhouse into the city, do we have to ask it to do more than just produce food? With access to infrastructure, can we push the community farm to its full potential, a community center?
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