Dickson Despommier Wants Our Cities to Be Like Forests
A leading proponent of vertical farming discusses how urban areas should adapt to a perilous environmental future.
By Jon Michaud
New Yorker
January 14, 2024
Excerpt:
Urban farming was a good idea, Despommier thought, but his students hadn’t taken it far enough. “What’s wrong with putting the farmer inside the building?” he asked them, remembering that at the time there were “hundreds to perhaps thousands” of empty buildings in New York City. Throughout the next decade, as he continued to teach the class, Despommier and his students developed this idea—including the use of cultivation techniques that required little or no soil—culminating in the 2010 book, “The Vertical Farm: Feeding the World in the 21st Century.” The concept proved popular and has been widely implemented. There are now more than two thousand vertical farms in the U.S. alone, with a market value estimated at $5.6 billion in 2022.
Though retired from full-time teaching, Despommier is still thinking about ecological problems. His latest book, “The New City: How to Build Our Sustainable Urban Future,” which evolved from a course that Despommier taught at Fordham University, is a manifesto for the future of cities on a warming planet. As Despommier notes, the world’s cities make up two per cent of the Earth’s surface but produce sixty per cent of the planet’s greenhouse emissions. And cities are likely to continue growing. It is estimated that, by the middle of this century, sixty-eight per cent of the world’s population will live in urban areas (up from fifty-seven per cent in 2021).
