Urban agriculture can promote nutritional security, food resilience, reduced distribution embodied impacts, and equitable access to healthy foods for burgeoning urban populations. Yet, the lack of open space, contaminated brownfields and surging land prices all constrain the establishment of urban farms and gardens.
These are the issues that University of Oregon architecture students tackled in the Building-Integrated Growing (BIG) Ag studio led by IHBE’s Mark Fretz and Gwynne Mhuireach, in collaboration with Gail Langellotto and her Horticulture students from Oregon State University. Students developed BIG concepts like rooftop farming, green facades, and controlled environment agriculture for a future model of urban agriculture in the United States, testing ideas for adaptive reuse and new construction on a reclaimed industrial site in Portland, Oregon.
The instructor and student experiences and design outcomes of this studio were presented in June of 2024 at the Urban Food System Symposium (UFSS) in Columbus, Ohio, and published in the UFSS peer-reviewed proceedings. It was also presented in June of 2024 at the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA) conference in Portland, Oregon.
