Emtech Students Place 2nd in International Competition

Emtech students Darrick Borowski, Jeroen Janssen, and Nicoletta Poulimeni have won 2nd prize in the Center for Urban Farming Competition with their entry Edible Infrastructures: Seed for a City based on their current Emtech research.

Edible Infrastructures: Seed for a City

The project proposes a neighborhood to serve as a Center for Urban Farming for Brooklyn and the greater New York City region. This new neighborhood type is organized around edible infrastructures, a systems-based approach to the food production, distribution, consumption and waste cycles. The Center as Neighborhood transcends the traditional institutional model to become a working community illustrating by example how the food system could be re-imagined via a new urban morphology which:

a.) Creates an ecology which can provide fruits and vegetables for its residents within the walk-able boundaries of the system via local, multi-scalar, distributed food production
b.) Enhances agricultural production by reconnecting the traditional waste-nutrient cycle which was lost with industrial farming
c.) De-couples food costs from fossil fuels by limiting food transportation at all levels, from source to table

The neighborhood is generated by a Settlement Simulation, a computational model based on a multi-state cellular automata. The model uses simple behavioral rules to recreate the aggregation logic of dwellings and small subsistence farms in a given area via an ‘unplanned’ vernacular methodology. The goal of the simulation was to investigate the sorts of distributions and collective form that might result without the oversight of a top-down ‘planner’.

More than a center or a neighborhood, the proposal is a prototype; an algorithmic procedural model for urban growth which considers food as an integral part of a cities’ energy infrastructure.