The H\xf6gdalen urban farm: a real case assessment of sustainability attributes

Rebecka Milestad,Christina Schaffer,Annika Carlsson-Kanyama

doi:10.1007/s12571-020-01045-8

Rebecka Milestad, Christina Schaffer + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s12571-020-01045-8

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Abstract

While urban indoor farming is a fairly new phenomenon, there is a growing interest from producers, authorities and consumers alike. However, many assumptions are made, and expectations held, about urban indoor farming from a sustainability, food production and food provisioning point of view. These assumptions and expectations need to be tested and assessed. This study assessed greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and a number of social aspects of a newly established indoor urban farm in Stockholm. The farm was the result of a project created by commercial, civil society and municipal actors with the aim to make use of unused urban space, create jobs and produce food. While lettuce grown on the indoor farm emitted more GHG than lettuce cultivated outdoors in Sweden, it was more climate friendly than imported lettuce in our comparison. Furthermore, the indoor farm created value for the actors involved and for the city district, albeit on a small scale. Many of the positive environmental and social features owed to the small scale of the indoor farm and the context in which it developed. Thus, when evaluating production systems like this one, we need to be cautious and refrain from extrapolating the results.

Highlights

Traditional forms of indoor farming, such as conventional greenhouse cultivation, still dominate the market globally in terms of space with 496,800 ha (Hortidaily 2019), but novel forms under various names have emerged in the last decade in the global North
In cities concerned with their food provisioning, urban farms in and on buildings can contribute to food production for the city, which is mirrored in the emergence of 193 North American Food Policy Plans (Morgan 2015)
As previous studies have shown that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in indoor farming are dominated by heating and lighting, we focused on gathering data from those processes for the indoor farming and contrasted it with GHG emissions from operations during farming on the open ground

Summary

Introduction

Traditional forms of indoor farming, such as conventional greenhouse cultivation, still dominate the market globally in terms of space with 496,800 ha (Hortidaily 2019), but novel forms under various names have emerged in the last decade in the global North. These include vertical farming (VF) (Despommier 2010), zero-acreage farming (Zfarming) (Specht et al 2014) and the closely related buildingintegrated agriculture (BIA) (Gould and Caplow 2012). Claims are made about how urban indoor farming can contribute to fulfilling sustainability goals (Despommier 2009; Germer et al 2011; Benke and Tomkins 2017)

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