Bringing food back into the city
Vertical farms and other forms of urban agriculture have social as well as environmental benefits, reports Richard Betts.
More than half of the global population lives in cities. As the world’s population keeps growing, cities are expanding. It is estimated that about 1.5 million people move to cities every week. The urbanisation trend is leading to growing claims on land and space and increasing demands for locally produced food. Yet most food is produced outside of cities: food often travels thousands of kilometres before reaching the consumer, and in so doing it generates thousands of tonnes of CO2 emissions.
There’s a strong case to be made for new forms of agriculture in and around cities. Redevco, which has made it its mission to lead the transformation of cities to make them liveable and sustainable, has investigated multi-trends within cities and health and wellbeing. One of the topics is food. Impact asked Brigit Gerritse, Redevco’s head of research and strategy, what the prospects and opportunities are.
You have been doing some research around food and the cities of the future. How does this connect with the UN Sustainable Development Goals?
The food system accounts for 10 out of 17 goals so it’s a very important topic. It’s also a very sensitive political topic. It’s connected to the Ukraine crisis, to Covid-19 and even to Brexit. Climate change, of course, has an impact on food security and food is connected to land use, water, waste and biodiversity and all these issues are connected to the future of cities. We have a great interest in the future of cities so we thought it’s an important topic to investigate further. It’s not so connected to cities that we can invest in it yet, but it’s something we’ll keep a close eye on.
How can ‘food’ in cities make a positive contribution to health and wellbeing, especially in terms of food?
When I first started looking into this I had all these romantic ideas about adding urban farming to make cities more liveable and sustainable. It’s not that easy, of course, but you can think about rooftop gardens and community gardens that can bring green to the city and help people in the community to work together. You should never underestimate the social impact of these initiatives in cities, but they also add to biodiversity in the city and reduce heat. Bringing food into the city and connecting it to the city has many advantages.
‘When you think of rooftop gardens and community gardens, these initiatives really fall into social impact investing.’
Brigit Gerritse, Redevco
We’ve been hearing and reporting more on innovations like vertical farming. How do you see that market going?
Vertical farming is very interesting and it can really solve a huge amount of problems in the future. There are these light industrial buildings, six stories high, growing mainly crops and herbs, 24 hours
a day all year round.
The big problem is that it needs a lot of energy, but on the other hand it only uses 5% of the water used in farmland. For instance, one vertical farm of 10,000 sq m can replace 600 to 700 hectares of land, which you can use for biodiversity, so it can solve a lot of problems but it’s still very difficult to be competitive to the market price for more traditionally-grown produce.
So how strong is the business case for vertical farming, particularly in cities?
Vertical farms really need to be in a very efficient location, otherwise it will be very difficult to be competitive. For instance, next to a large distribution centre of a supermarket, with renewable energy available, like solar panels or wind turbines, which is unlikely in a city location.
Connecting vertical farming to a city is difficult, although there are examples, like the Dutch company Growy, which is going to build a vertical farm in the harbour which is very close to Amsterdam. Then they will use all the waste from the local restaurants and bring it to a fermenter and use this for their energy supply. This is very innovative, so we will follow their progress. Maybe in the near future there will be more possibilities to do vertical farming inside cities.
Is it possible to add value on the real estate side?
It depends. In cities like Singapore where there’s lack of arable land, or in Saudi Arabia where there’s also heat and lack of water, vertical farming is definitely growing very fast and it can have a connection to real estate. In Europe that’s not the case at the moment.
We are seeing some examples of larger buildings in cities that are now used to add smaller vertical farms, usually more on an educational basis, or connected to leisure or food and beverage. That can really help to connect food to the city and food can help in connecting people.
What role can an investor like Redevco play in this market to promote initiatives around social impact?
Food does have a social impact and therefore it’s very important to connect food to the city again. When you think of rooftop gardens and community gardens, these initiatives really fall into social impact investing. They have a huge impact on the surrounding area and the neighbourhood, it brings people together and they can even earn some money out of it. It can really help to make the cities more livable and sustainable.
We at Redevco really feel that this is going to be the future.
