Scott Lloyd and Alexis Kalagas, Last-mile Logistics, 2021

Linking sustainability advocates, ‘AgTech’ evangelists, hyper-local gastronomes, social justice campaigners, venture capitalists, spatial designers, and real estate developers, contemporary urban food production is fast evolving beyond the performative lifestyle signifiers of boutique rooftop farms and edible gardens. As real-time algorithmic precision enables increasingly compact, low-energy, and automated forms of high-yield indoor cultivation without soil or natural light, parallel advances in lab-grown ‘cultured meat’ and designer plant-based proteins suggest a future where cities could soon become productive hubs positioned within more circular and localised food systems. These developments would not only significantly reduce the 21 to 37 percent of anthropogenic carbon emissions attributed to the inefficiencies of the existing agro-industrial complex, but also contribute through surface planting to a range of associated ‘ecosystem services’, including decreasing stormwater runoff, mitigation of the heat-island effect, nitrogen fixation, and biological pest control.⁶

AeroFarms, which employs a closed-loop aeroponics growing system augmented by predictive analytics and machine learning, harvests almost 1,000 tons of salad greens annually across its modular vertical farms in post-industrial Newark, New Jersey: repurposing a steel mill, laser-tag facility and shuttered nightclub. The cloud-connected network of Berlin-based Infarm is expected to expand to 5 million square feet (465,000 square metres) of distributed productive space across Europe, North America, and Asia by 2025, including controlled in-store growing environments in major supermarkets and grocery stores. Late last year, San Francisco startup Eat Just announced plans to build a new facility in Singapore, shortly before its cell-cultured chicken was the first lab-grown meat product worldwide to gain regulatory approval, consistent with the ‘30 by 30’ initiative led by the Singapore Food Agency to produce 30 percent of the country’s food supply locally by 2030 (the city-state currently imports more than 90 percent of its food).⁷

The diversity and density of urban resource flows can also subvert territorial-scale processes of extraction. Food waste is responsible for 10 percent of global emissions.⁸ Within cities, less than 2 percent of nutrients in discarded organic resources (food waste at the point of distribution or consumption, processed food byproducts, human sewage) are captured for reuse—a focus for closed-loop experiments as far back as Graham Caine’s Eco-House (1972). Built with the anarchist collective Street Farm, Architectural Association (AA) student Caine lived in the off-grid prototype with his family in South London for three years.⁹ More recently, Bubbly Dynamics has adapted an industrial meatpacking facility in Chicago as a food startup incubator and living laboratory. The Plant recovers more than 40 percent of byproducts through integrated aquaponics, algae bioreactors, and anaerobic digestion. These metabolic processes, supported by collaborative platforms like NYSP2I’s Organic Resource Locator that identify symbiotic adjacencies at an urban scale, can reduce resource inputs in more circular systems and feed the cultivation of composite biomaterials.

Scott Lloyd and Alexis Kalagas, The Cathedral of Eating, 2021

Supply-side innovations are matched by transforming practices of urban food consumption, shaped by a pervasive sense of time, energy, and labour in flux: an accelerated cultural progression from farm-to-table to ‘ghost-kitchen-to-sofa’.¹⁰ Amazon (Deliveroo) and Google (Kitchen United) are investing heavily in plug-and-play dark kitchen infrastructure optimised for delivery. The Neighborhood Kitchens Food Hall exists only as a virtual storefront in Uber Eats, with ‘last block’ fulfilment handled by Reef Technologies via its network of off-grid kitchen pods located in 4,500 parking lots across the United States. In California, Zume Pizza orders are half-cooked by robots in a sterile production facility and finished in constantly circulating food truck ovens, seamlessly integrating food preparation into the choreography of logistics flows. In China, Hema—a chain backed by Alibaba—has reimagined the supermarket as fulfilment centre, and restaurant dining as automated theatre, channelled through a single app interface linked to the Alipay e-payment platform.

Even before enforced social distancing and stay-at-home orders laid waste to the hospitality sector in countless cities, more than half of restaurant spending in the US was already projected to be ‘off premises’ in 2020.¹¹ As operators worldwide pivoted abruptly amid the pandemic to cling to revenue lifelines, the improvised assembly of entirely new supply chains—connecting small-scale food producers directly to urban customers via a web of hybrid food service and retail models—suggests the future potential for digital channels and distributed physical spaces to challenge the monopolistic control of supermarket conglomerates, while reinstating the social rituals and community resilience once present at the intersection of food production and consumption. The alternative is evident in the cold logic of an unbound global food system, which recently saw India’s locked-down coastal states opting to buy soybean oil shipped from Argentina rather than trucking it from inland producers.¹²

In the face of continuing Covid-19 disruption, the agile, adaptive capacity of urban food systems has also produced instructive examples of care and mutual aid: from the repurposing of municipal buses by groups of private volunteers in Wuhan to create mobile food hubs supporting communities in lockdown, to the conversion of Toronto libraries into distribution centres, Lagos schools into decentralised, physically distanced markets, time-share food lockers in Milan, and ‘mobile markets’ in Manila. Beyond a concern for those most vulnerable to shocks and contagion, these initiatives demonstrate how designers can think creatively beyond the singular spaces and functions conventionally associated with food in cities, embedding accessible, flexible micro-infrastructures throughout the urban landscape and harnessing the capacity for local self-organisation—an entanglement of uses evoked in the image of the city as simultaneously a ‘dining room, market, and farm’.¹³

The revolution in urban food systems underway may position food at the centre of an expanded field of production urbanism. Localised, networked, and hybrid, distributed models mirror the complexity of the city itself, enabling regenerative zones of activity within the hollowed-out spaces of a dematerialised capitalist landscape. Through our ongoing design research project The Distributed Cooperative, we are exploring strategies to reimagine mixed-use cooperative housing at a neighbourhood scale: automating the search for undiscovered spatial potential embedded within a city’s existing urban fabric and exploding the diverse functions usually consolidated within a single development across a cluster of sites. Beyond opportunities for infill housing, the strategy also begins to trace the contours of an alternative approach to adaptive reuse—reprogramming and retrofitting multiple spaces to perform as an integrated foodscape uniting future modes of production and consumption.

In the new kind of city emerging, hyper-local, digitally traceable supply chains will deliver bio-engineered food to our tables, laboured over round-the-clock by loving machines in airless laboratory settings. It is a city where seamless last-mile logistics infrastructures maintain an optimal flow of just-in-time fresh produce for assisted home preparation, circulated by a non-stop fleet of autonomous refrigerated smart lockers. Certified ‘organic’, the a-seasonal fruit and vegetables arrive direct-to-consumer as a perpetual harvest, fulfilled by a shifting network of compact aeroponic arrays optimised by machine-learning growing systems, casting a pink nighttime glow in vacant storefronts. The same produce is purchased, via AI-driven inventory management, by a ghost kitchen hospitality incubator renting shared space by the hour. In a vertically integrated platform model, fledgling virtual restaurants nimbly execute dynamic menus responding to neighbourhood-scale predictive analytics, operating out of off-grid modules nestled into unseen urban interstices.

It is a city where the organic waste generated across the network is monitored and traded through a booming digital marketplace, including to a nearby warehouse as pasteurised substrate destined to be seeded with spores of mycelium to fabricate fire-resistant insulation for low-carbon construction. Across the street, a new ‘fast casual takeaway’ concept has launched, where industrial robots 3D-print finish-at-home meals from nutrient-rich food concentrates, catering to personalised diet plans informed by nutrigenomics and a constant stream of real-time data from ubiquitous wearable biomonitors. On ‘cheat’ days, locals flock to the popular neighbourhood microbrewery. Perusing the menu, they choose between ‘fried cultured chicken’ or supersized vegan burgers, oblivious to how the protein substitute is produced from a basement microalgae farm fed by carbon dioxide released during a beer fermentation process practised unchanged by humans for more than 5,000 years.

These technologies already exist. As our built environments transition to accommodate new realities and new possibilities, food’s dual role as both sustenance and fetish object can obscure larger questions of food insecurity and labour precarity—issues the pandemic has brought into stark relief. In designing more efficient, resilient, and circular models that enable food to reclaim distributed spaces of production in the meta-industrial city, challenging our understanding of terroir, it will be essential to preserve diversity and complexity. Despite the active role of grassroots movements and organisations, platform logic and venture-backed growth reward industry consolidation and the scale necessary to capture network effects: a countervailing force to the power of ‘small pieces, loosely joined’.¹⁴ Whether hi- or low-tech, the future of food in our cities depends on the same resistance to monocultures that has driven the revival of localised food systems worldwide.

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1. FAO, FAO Framework for the Urban Food Agenda (2019) 6. 

2. Carolyn Steel, ‘Hungry for Change: Cities Don’t Feed Themselves’, The Architectural Review 1455 (October 2018). For an explanation of ‘logistification’, see Jesse LeCavalier, The Rule of Logistics: Walmart and the Architecture of Fulfilment (2016) 6. 

3. See Jane Jacobs, The Economy of Cities (1970). 

4. Ebenezer Howard, Garden Cities of To-morrow [1902] (1965); Le Corbusier, The City of Tomorrow and its Planning, 8th ed, (1987) 204. 

5. See Twigs Way, Allotments (2008).

6. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change and Land: Summary for Policymakers (2019) 7; Nicholas Clinton et al, ‘A Global Geospatial Ecosystem Services Estimate of Urban Agriculture’, Earth’s Future 6(1) (2018) 40–60. 

7. Catherine Shu, ‘Eat Just to Sell Lab-Grown Meat in Singapore After Gaining “World First” Regulatory Approval’, Tech Crunch (2 December 2020). 

8. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2019) 24. 

9. Lydia Kallipoliti, ‘From Shit to Food: Graham Caine’s Eco-House in South London, 1972–1975’, Buildings & Landscapes: Journal of the Vernacular Architecture Forum 19 (1) (2012) 87; Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Cities and Circular Economy for Food (2019) 19. 

10. Jonah Engel Bromwich, ‘Farm to Table? More Like Ghost Kitchen to Sofa’, New York Times (24 December 2019). 

11. Derek Thompson, ‘The Booming, Ethically Dubious Business of Food Delivery’, The Atlantic (2 August 2019).

12. ‘The World Food System Has So Far Weathered the Challenge of Covid-19’, The Economist (9 May 2020).

13. See Karen A Franck, ‘The City as Dining Room, Market, and Farm’ in Karen A Franck (ed), Food + The City (AD, May/June 2005) 10.

14. Dan Hill, ‘Small Pieces Loosely Joined: Practices for Super-Local Participative Urbanism’ in Mark Burry (ed), Urban Futures: Designing the Digitalised City (AD, May/June 2020) 66–71.