China: What will the urban greenhouse of the future look like?
Sigrid pointed at the blurring that’s happening between the rural and urban areas, with cities moving into the rural area and vice versa. As a result, there’s a balancing act going on between indoor and outdoor production.
By Jan Jacob Mekes
HortiDaily
June 23, 2020
Excerpt:
The market for fresh produce in China is looking very interesting. With a growing middle class, and safely produced, healthy food being high on the agenda in light of the current pandemic, all the ingredients are there for growth. So it’s no surprise that China was chosen as the location for the second Urban Greenhouse Challenge (UGC). Twenty student teams went head to head, planning concepts, combining agriculture and architecture to create some very interesting projects. Yesterday, the ten teams that would go to the final were announced in a webinar, which also offered a glimpse at what the future of urban farming might look like.
First up to provide their opinion on this were selection committee members Tiffany Tsui, independent consultant, and René Gommersbach of Rabobank. Highlighting the aspects that make the Chinese market particularly interesting, as she had already done in an earlier UGC event, Tiffany called the food industry one of the most interesting fields for investment in the coming years, with Chinese consumers looking for safe, environmentally friendly food. “It will be the next big area for investment,” she noted, pointing to the changing supply chain in China, where consumers are more and more buying their food through e-commerce rather than at the traditional wet markets.
