From Concrete to Crops: Why Cities Need Vertical Farms

Last year, my boyfriend and I gave my parents a Click and Grow smart garden for their kitchen. It was a small device, sleek, self-watering, and about the size of a coffee machine, but watching herbs sprout on their windowsill felt surprisingly significant. Within a few weeks, they were harvesting basil and parsley, all grown under soft LED lights, regardless of the season. It made me realize how little space and effort it takes to produce fresh food at home. That simple gift sparked a larger question in my mind that came back to me this week during my Scenario Planning class: What if we could apply that same logic on a city-wide scale?

Cue: Vertical Farming 

Urban Areas Are Growing—and So Are Their Food Challenges

By 2050, nearly 70 percent of the global population will be living in urban areas (United Nations, 2018). Cities are becoming denser, more resource-intensive, and increasingly disconnected from the food systems that sustain them. While urban populations rise, arable land per capita continues to shrink (Despommier, 2010). Much of the food we eat in cities travels long distances before reaching us, consuming fossil fuels and losing freshness along the way.

Urban areas face a paradox. On one hand, they are hubs of innovation and policy action. On the other hand, they are highly vulnerable to food insecurity, supply chain disruptions, and ecological over-demand. Bringing food production closer to where people live could be a meaningful way to increase local resilience. Vertical farming offers that possibility, and its not even a vision for the far future but rather something that can be done now. 

What Is Vertical Farming?

Vertical farming is a method of growing food in vertically stacked layers, usually indoors, using controlled environments. These farms do not rely on soil or natural sunlight. Instead, they use hydroponics (where roots grow in nutrient-rich water) or aeroponics (where roots are misted with nutrients), and are illuminated by LED lighting systems (Al-Kodmany, 2018). Everything from the temperature and humidity to the pH of the water is carefully monitored and adjusted to provide ideal growing conditions.

By using these systems, vertical farms can grow food year-round, independent of weather or season. They typically consume up to 95 percent less water than conventional agriculture and require no chemical pesticides (Benke & Tomkins, 2017). Because they’re located close to consumers, often right in urban centers, transport emissions and storage requirements are also significantly reduced.

This kind of farming isn’t meant to replace all conventional agriculture, but it can complement it in critical ways, especially in cities where land is scarce and the demand for fresh, local produce is high.

Why Cities? Why Now?

Cities are where vertical farming makes the most sense. Urban areas often lack access to fertile land, yet they house the majority of consumers. Bringing farming into cities reduces the physical and environmental distance between where food is produced and where it is eaten. That means less energy used in transportation and refrigeration, faster delivery of fresh produce, and fewer supply chain vulnerabilities (Specht et al., 2014).

Moreover, cities contain vast amounts of underused vertical space, rooftops, vacant buildings, and old warehouses that can be repurposed for food production. Former industrial sites and even parking garages are being converted into high-tech indoor farms. This repurposing is especially appealing in areas undergoing post-industrial redevelopment or looking to integrate sustainability into urban planning.

From a social perspective, urban farming can create local jobs, foster community connections, and improve access to healthy food in underserved neighborhoods (Sanye-Mengual et al., 2016). In places where food deserts persist, vertical farming could offer not just greens, but empowerment.

A Look at Vertical Farming in Practice

Around the world, several initiatives have brought vertical farming out of the lab and into cities.

In Singapore, the government is actively investing in vertical farming to increase the city-state’s food security. Companies like Sky Greens and Sustenir are producing leafy greens locally, even with extremely limited land availability (Low, 2020). Singapore’s goal is to produce 30 percent of its nutritional needs domestically by 2030, and vertical farming plays a major role in that strategy (Singapore Food Agency, 2020).

In the United States, Newark-based AeroFarms operates one of the world’s largest indoor vertical farms, growing millions of pounds of leafy greens per year in a repurposed steel mill (AeroFarms, 2023). In Europe, Infarm has developed modular vertical farms that are placed directly in supermarkets (Infarm, 2022), so customers can buy produce that was harvested just meters away 

These examples show that vertical farming isn’t just a theoretical solution but a real and growing part of the global food system. Still, it comes with complications. 

Limitations 

The biggest concern is energy consumption. Replacing sunlight with artificial lighting and maintaining controlled climates requires a substantial amount of electricity. While LED technology has become more efficient, the environmental benefit of vertical farms depends heavily on how that energy is sourced (O’Sullivan et al., 2019). If powered by fossil fuels, the sustainability gains from reduced transport and water use can be undermined.

Start-up costs are another hurdle. Setting up a vertical farm requires large initial investments in infrastructure, software, and climate control systems. As a result, much of the industry is still led by large companies or highly subsidized ventures. This raises concerns about equity and access, particularly when it comes to scaling the model in lower-income areas or supporting community-led farming initiatives.

There’s also the question of crop variety. Most vertical farms focus on leafy greens and herbs because they’re fast-growing, lightweight, and don’t require complex root systems. However, staples like wheat, potatoes (although the scenario in the movie “Passengers” makes me think), and rice remain impractical to grow indoors at scale, at least for now (Kalantari et al., 2017).

In short, vertical farming is not a silver bullet, but it is an important piece of a broader strategy to make food systems more sustainable and resilient.

A Role for Urban Policy and Planning

For vertical farming to thrive in urban areas, cities need to create the conditions that make it viable (Thomaier et al., 2015). That includes updating zoning laws to allow agricultural activity in non-traditional spaces, offering financial incentives for renewable energy use, and integrating vertical farming into sustainability and food security plans .

Some cities have already begun to do this. Paris, for instance, is promoting urban farming through its “Parisculteurs” initiative, which aims to cover rooftops and walls with agricultural projects (Mairie de Paris, 2023). In Brussels, a former slaughterhouse was converted into an aquaponic vertical farm that grows vegetables and raises fish in a closed-loop system (BIGH, 2022).

Municipal support can also take the form of education and community engagement. Schools, libraries, and neighborhood organizations can play a role in introducing urban residents to new food production methods and building local food literacy. The more people understand where their food comes from, the more likely they are to support sustainable innovations.

Personal Reflection: From Windowsills to City Blocks

Our Click and Grow experiment didn’t revolutionize the food system, but it reminded me of something important: growing food can be simple, tangible, and deeply satisfying. Watching something edible grow in your own home, without chemicals or transport or packaging, is a powerful experience. It shifts your relationship with what you eat.

Scaling that experience to the level of cities isn’t just a matter of technology. It’s about mindset and political will. It’s about rethinking what cities are for. Not just places to live and work, but places to grow and regenerate.

Vertical farming is not a replacement for all agriculture, nor should it be. However, in an era of climate uncertainty, resource depletion, and urban growth, it offers a way to localize part of our food system, reduce environmental strain, and make cities more self-reliant.

The future of vertical farming will depend on how we manage energy use, how inclusive we make the model, and how well we integrate it into urban policy and planning. It will also depend on our willingness to question the assumption that food can only come from rural landscapes.

If done thoughtfully, vertical farming could become a defining feature of 21st-century cities, a core infrastructure. Farms above grocery stores, in former shopping malls, or integrated into residential buildings could become the norm.

As we think about how to feed a growing, urbanizing world sustainably, vertical farming offers an answer:  local, efficient, and year-round food production embedded within our cities.

References

AeroFarms. (2023). AeroFarms: Our farms. https://www.aerofarms.com/

Al-Kodmany, K. (2018). The vertical farm: A review of developments and implications for the vertical city. Buildings, 8(2), 24. https://doi.org/10.3390/buildings8020024

Benke, K., & Tomkins, B. (2017). Future food-production systems: Vertical farming and controlled-environment agriculture. Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy, 13(1), 13–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2017.1394054

BIGH. (2022). Brussels’ aquaponic urban farm. https://www.bigh.be

Despommier, D. (2010). The vertical farm: Feeding the world in the 21st century. Thomas Dunne Books.

Infarm. (2022). How it works. https://www.infarm.com

Kalantari, F., Tahir, O. M., Joni, R. A., & Fatemi, E. (2017). Opportunities and challenges in sustainability of vertical farming: A review. Journal of Landscape Ecology, 11(1), 35–60. https://doi.org/10.1515/jlecol-2017-0016

Low, J. (2020). Can vertical farms feed Singapore? The Straits Times. https://www.straitstimes.com

Mairie de Paris. (2023). Parisculteurs: Végétaliser la ville. https://www.paris.fr/pages/parisculteurs-5004

O’Sullivan, C. A., Bonnett, G. D., McIntosh, P. C., Daetwyler, H. D., & Godwin, I. D. (2019). Strategies to improve the productivity, product diversity and profitability of urban agriculture. Agronomy for Sustainable Development, 39(3), 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13593-019-0577-9

Sanye-Mengual, E., Specht, K., Krikser, T., Vejre, H., Aragonés, A., & Orsini, F. (2016). Social acceptance and perceived ecosystem services of urban agriculture in Southern Europe: The case of Bologna, Italy. PLOS ONE, 11(9), e0162620. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0162620

Singapore Food Agency. (2020). 30 by 30 goal: Strengthening Singapore’s food security. https://www.sfa.gov.sg

Specht, K., Siebert, R., Hartmann, I., Freisinger, U. B., Sawicka, M., Werner, A., Thomaier, S., Henckel, D., Walk, H., & Dierich, A. (2014). Urban agriculture of the future: An overview of sustainability aspects of food production in and on buildings. Agriculture and Human Values, 31, 33–51. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-013-9448-4

Thomaier, S., Specht, K., Henckel, D., Dierich, A., Siebert, R., Freisinger, U. B., & Sawicka, M. (2015). Farming in and on urban buildings: Present practice and specific novelties of Zero-Acreage Farming (ZFarming). Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems, 30(1), 43–54. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1742170514000143

United Nations. (2018). World urbanization prospects: The 2018 revision. https://population.un.org/wup/

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