The food producing city of tomorrow: Food production versus city living

I did my graduation project at the master track Dutch Dwelling, Architecture. The studio describes the graduation assignment as following: “The task in the Dutch Housing Graduation Studio is to design a housing project that fits in a scenario of your own making for the future of Amsterdam. Behind the brief for an apartment building lie the bigger questions of ‘how do we want to live in thefuture?’ and ‘what do our cities need?’”To answer this question, I asked myself what kind of problems Amsterdam will face in the future in order to be able to answer the first question, what will Amsterdam need in the future. There are numerous issues that the future city have to deal with, and my approach was that if a city focuses on food production within the urban fabric, it can at the same time tackle a lot of otherissues in different fields as energy, rainwater management and reusing resources. When focusing on food production in the city, you encounter two sides of this topic. There is a technical side and a social side. In my research and design I stress this twofold. The project is about combining these two elements, using technology to make the food production as efficient as possible and incorporating the social aspects of food production to increase the livability ofresidents and the people visiting. To let these two elements profit from each other, the dwellers of the green and the green of the dwellers, was the challenge of the design.I designed the dwellings for the project, a public ground floor, I designed the green house and a huge conservatory coffering these elements, saying that this is the part where all these elements come together. The main design question became how this conservatory can truthfully become the part that brings the project together. An other design focus point became the relation between inside and oudside, making the transition very gradually