Urban Agriculture - A Reaction to Supply and Demand

ENG_In the last hundred years the planet’s population has increased by 400% to become 7.3 billion, and that number increases exponentially every year. This leads to issues of supply and demand. The concept of supply and demand is of the utmost importance in relation to a functional city. Everyday, there is an enormous amount of energy consumed by the population of a given city. A large portion of this energy consumed is due to the food industry. The significant increase in the world’s population is a factor that is forcing agriculture to adapt to a new landscape. Many factors contribute to the consumption of energy in the food industry, but arguably the largest consumer of this energy is a result of the transportation of food from its source to its distributor and then finally to the consumer. This energy is composed not only of fossil fuels, but also of different factors such as time and money. If the location of the production of the goods were to be moved closer to the consumer, the energy used would significantly decrease and it may also result in the creation of new infrastructure and jobs.
The notion of urban agriculture is one that consists of the growth and production of food in and around a town, city or metropolis. The concept can be introduced into the composition of a city at a small or large scale. The city of Havana is a model of how an extreme version of urban agriculture can function. Havana produces 75% of the vegetables it consumes within the city itself. Part of the success of Havana’s urban agriculture relies on the fact that the farms in the city that produce food are no longer state owned farms. In the early 1990s, many of the farms were privatized and now individuals own and run the farms, making money off of the work they put into the crop. Another city that has incorporated the urban farm into the fabric of the city on a smaller scale is Vancouver. One seventh of the jobs in Vancouver are in relation to food production. By embracing the concept of bringing food production into the city, time, money and energy aren’t wasted on transportation and jobs are created within the city. This draws the population into the city and detracts from suburban sprawl. 

For further reading see Harvard Business Review and City Case Study Havana.

Contributed by: Isabella Priddle