Urban agriculture can promote nutritional security, food resilience, reduced distribution embodied impacts, and equitable access to healthy foods for burgeoning urban populations. Yet, the lack of open space, contaminated brownfields and surging land prices all constrain the establishment of urban farms and gardens. New urban agricultural production sites can be made available through new building-integrated growing of agriculture (the new “BIG [ag]”) such as rooftop farming, green facades, and controlled environment agriculture, creating simultaneous co-benefits where building outputs are recycled as inputs to the agricultural system, and agricultural outputs ultimately provide healthy, resilient, and sustainable inputs to building systems and users. 

To develop BIG [ag] concepts suitable for North America, this course will draw on and learn from an area of the world that has made a deep commitment to the development of urban agriculture: Singapore. One of the densest cities in the world, Singapore has 8592 persons/km and is 100% urbanized. Singapore has about 720 km2, of which only 1% is set aside for food production, thus the region imports over 90% of its food. Nonetheless, Singapore’s government aims to produce 30% of its own food by 2030 (30 by 30 Program). Singapore has many successful models of building-integrated agriculture, which will be toured, experienced and analyzed by students. Students will have the opportunity to meet with urban farm operators and learn from their experience. Using these successful international models of urban food production, students in the case study seminar will document new BIG [ag] concepts through extensive field study using sketch, photographs, diagrams, 2D/3D drawings and models, then propose a viable model for the United States testing ideas on urban sites in the U.S.