Urban Farming: What’s Different Today

The goals of urban farmers today diverge from historically recurring aims and themes in the role of newly developed technologies and design. In a sense, they have picked up where earlier projects left off creating rooftop, vertical, and hydroponic farms. In Greenpoint (Brooklyn, New York), the Eagle Street Rooftop Farm is a 6,000-square-foot farm that looks out across the East River to the United Nations building. Gotham Greens began harvesting from a 12,000-square-foot hydroponic greenhouse on a rooftop in Brooklyn in June 2011. Sky Vegetables, based in San Francisco, is planning a 1-acre rooftop greenhouse on top of a former shoe factory in Brockton, Massachusetts. City Hall in Chicago is topped with a large garden and the restaurant Uncommon Ground began the city’s first certified organic urban farm on its roof in 2009. City Farm operates a farm and farmstand directly between Chicago’s low-income Cabrini Green neighborhood and the affluent Gold Coast.