Urban Orchard – Prizing winning concept for the Growing Up design competitio...

 

 

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Urban Orchard – Prizing winning concept for the Growing Up design competition 2009

via City Farmer News by Michael Levenston on 2/7/10

Urban Orchard

By Andrew Maynard Architects, a young Melbourne, Australian firm

Premise

A cities gardens can be more than a decorated landscape. Like the built environment, green spaces can work with us to make an integrated urban environment rather than isolated pockets of manicured greenery.
We propose a garden that contributes a SOCIAL space, creates a low impact and sustainable ECONOMIC model, beautifies the URBAN landscape and improves our urban areas impact on the ENVIRONMENT.

We propose that rather than only producing a beautiful, green rooftop space, we also create a greater, and achievable urban gesture. We propose a working garden that is wonderful to visit, great to have events at, while also producing food much like Cuba's Market Gardens.

Close the food loop – reuse food waste

At the moment we bring food from many hundreds of kilometres away into urban centres. After the food is consumed by-products and food waste are placed in landfill. This material can easily be put back into the food loop by converting it into power and fertiliser.

Food scraps = global warming

Melbourne has a diverse and rich food culture. As such Melbourne transport's a large variety of foods into the city and produces an extremely large amount of food waste. Decomposing food scraps contribute to roughly 10% of man-made greenhouse gases in the form of Methane. If we captured this Methane we can easily convert the Methane into a free, clean energy source. The by product of this process is fertiliser which can be put back into the system to create more roof top produced food rather than more landfill.

It is estimated that 2 million homes in the UK could be run entirely on methane generated energy if London were to collect and process all of its food scraps. If London adopted clean, free methane energy this would radically change London's environmental footprint while also drastically reducing the need for transport and landfill for food scrap waste. The calculations have been done in London. Why not put the concept into practice in Melbourne.

See more on their web site here.

 

 

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