Not a Way to Shrink a City's Ecological Footprint

The latest urban-planning idea (seen via Boing Boing) is vertical farming:

What if "eating local" in Shanghai or New York meant getting your fresh produce from five blocks away? And what if skyscrapers grew off the grid, as verdant, self-sustaining towers where city slickers cultivated their own food?

Dr. Dickson Despommier, a professor of public health at Columbia University, hopes to make these zucchini-in-the-sky visions a reality. Despommier's pet project is the "vertical farm," a concept he created in 1999 with graduate students in his class on medical ecology, the study of how the environment and human health interact.

The idea, which has captured the imagination of several architects in the United States and Europe in the past several years, just caught the eye of another big city dreamer: Scott Stringer, the Manhattan borough president in New York.

When Stringer heard about the concept in June, he said he immediately pictured a "food farm" addition to the New York City skyline. "Obviously we don't have vast amounts of vacant land," he said in a phone interview. "But the sky is the limit in Manhattan." Stringer's office is "sketching out what it would take to pilot a vertical farm," and plans to pitch a feasibility study to the mayor's office within the next couple of months, he said.

"I think we can really do this," he added. "We could get the funding."

At first glance this looks like a way to shrink a city's ecological footprint (the goal of eating locally). This will make it less necessary to get food from sprawling farms. After actually thinking about it, it looks more pointless. All those plants will need grow lights. (I realize the main advocates for this type of nonsense probably think grow lights are only needed for their favorite plant, but they'll be needed for vertical farms in general.) If the energy is generated by solar power, they'll merely replace the rural farms with rural solar collectors and import power instead of food.

The only way this even comes close to making sense is if the needed energy is generated by nuclear power plants. Wait a moment … It's starting to make sense now …

On the other hand, that will aggravate the urban heat-island effect. We'll replace global warming with even more uncomfortable local warming.