Abstract

ABSTRACT

As the world progresses through time, it has two main challenges to address –Population growth and environmental pollution because of inability to manage our wastes. The two issues are invariably interconnected on many levels.

For the past 1000 years, humans have been associating farming only to- and restrict it to rural areas. But the greatest impact of population rise is the rise in the number of urban hungry and the increase in demand for agricultural land to grow food for them. Another major issue is in the question of waste management. Cities receive a large quantity of produce through ships, and trucks from farmlands and convert all this to waste that now reside in landfills

and dump yards.

Urban agriculture is an initiative to create a self-sustaining ecological cycle of food and waste in the urban environment by incorporating agriculture into the cityscape. The means to do this could vary from small scale initiatives like converting terrace spaces into farmlands, to cultivation on top of green roofs and green walls, converting unused urban pockets into productive landscapes, creating skyscrapers to produce crops on every floor through vertical farming and so on. The implementation of such a system could not only help enhance the economy of the country by providing a new sector for employment in urban areas, but also create widespread social change by altering the biased idea of ‗farming‘ in the minds of the urban consumer. Mark Boyle – ‗the moneyless man said, ―if we grew our own food, we wouldn‘t waste a third of it as we do today‖

This dissertation is a targeted study on continuous productive urban landscapes, urban agriculture and vertical farming, aiming to critically analyse its need, suggest solutions for its implementation and explore its feasibility through case studies from different parts of the world.