The potential of urban family vertical farming: A pilot study of Shanghai

Abstract

Sustainable cities are increasingly requiring local food systems. On the contrary, food self-sufficiency rate in many cities is continuously decreasing. In recent years, the concept of vertical farming (VF) has begun to show its advantages in providing a promising hope for alleviating this contradiction. However, there are few studies on the potential of VF on a city scale. This paper aims to assess the economic feasibility of an urban family vertical farming (UFVF) in Shanghai newly-built residential by modeling typical family planting mode, and using the evaluation software of vertical farms (VFer) software for calculation. Meanwhile, the influence of UFVF on the self-sufficiency rate of vegetables and fruits of households and the whole city is investigated. The results demonstrate that the UFVF contributes to increasing the self-sufficiency rate of vegetables and fruits by 20.68 % and 2.54 %, respectively, which could be important to enhance the resilience of local food system. Additionally, the return on investment of UFVF could achieve approximately 30 %. The proposed techno-economic model can assist to better predicting the small-scale VF on the urban scale, which provides a basis for decision-making on development of sustainable urban agriculture.