Establishment of Urban Bio Spaces

Based on the food4future extreme scenarios, in which  a sufficient food supply cannot be guaranteed in the future either through global trade ("No Trade") or through sufficient arable and grazing land for the conventional cultivation of plants and breeding of animals ("No Land"), alternatives must be created that allow food to be produced in sufficient quantity and quality independently these factors. One possibility here is the development of so-called “Urban Bio Spaces”, which offer various organisms optimal conditions for growth while enabling high productivity in a small area. These spaces can be a combination of a large number of different self-contained individual cells (so-called compartments), which gives them the ability to adapt to changing basic conditions such as available space, food demand or type of organism. Due to this modular construction, the integration of the bio spaces into an urban environment is viable. Thereby, previously unused space in public domains or on top of roofs can be effectively used for food production.

Very high demands are made on the chemical and physical properties of the compartments. On the one hand, they must have sufficient mechanical strength (e.g. to enable machine harvesting) and on the other hand, their weight should be as low as possible to simplify handling and not affect the static strength of buildings. Other important properties of the construction materials can be UV stability or transparency, so that sunlight can penetrate into the interior. For this purpose, suitable fiber-reinforced materials that offer the potential to combine the required properties are developed. They consist of fibrous materials (such as glass fibers), which ensure high mechanical strength, and plastics (reactive resins), which shape the composites and make them highly resistant to environmental influences. The chemical and physical properties of the reactive resins can be adjusted according to the specific requirements.

In order to create ideal growing conditions for the various organisms, it is also necessary to integrate suitable heat and light sources. The optimal conditions are determined by the project partners within the research field Organisms. Appropriate technical devices, such as LED modules or heating elements, will be integrated into the fiber-reinforced plastics.

During the course of project, the developed materials and methods will be used to create several of these compartments as prototypes to investigate the possibilities of cultivating food-producing organisms in urban environments.

Text: J. Sabban, O. Kahle, PYCO