#riverla

Context of Los Angeles

Los Angeles has been experiencing a resurgence of interest in urban agriculture as our city grows denser, taller, and ever more diverse.   Beyond the veil of hollywood glamour, a cultural shift has been slowly emerging - a movement towards a healthy and environmentally conscious lifestyle, a resurfaced interest in strengthening our diverse communities and an effort to becoming more resilient as a city.  Water, food and energy have been central topics of discourse as we chart our way towards carbon neutrality.  Essential to this transformation is a re-imagination of our food system.  How do we reduce our consumption of natural resources while increasing the reliability of our food supply?  Where does food production fit in our urban context? And furthermore, how would vertical farming affect urban form?

Devika from Perkins+Will and Jose begin preliminary sketching (team two)

Connecting the Country to the City

The Cornfield Arroyo Seco Specific Plan (CASP) proposes a vision that integrates farming land use in an urban landscape.  Our workshop group was tasked with designing a vertical farm on a parcel within this zoning area.  Ethnic neighborhoods surrounding the LA River are currently identified as food deserts with no real access to fresh produce.  With this in mind, our team set out to bring the country to this predominantly industrial neighborhood.

Johanna presents on how team one would integrate with the local neighborhood

Agro-Hub

Touring LA Cleantech Incubator's (LACI) facility helped us realize the potential in marrying clean-tech ideas with business mentoring.  With the nearby LA Kitchen, Goodwill culinary training and worksource station, we identified an opportunity to foster economic growth by serving as a hub for local culinary businesses.  Community members would be able to rent a full industrial kitchen, garden space as well as offices and administrative resources.  Offering these resources would empower the larger community to not only produce their own healthy food, but also to create businesses that would over time mitigate the “food desert” status.

Eighty thousand square feet of vertical farming area would produce twenty pounds of crop per square feet, which at wholesale price would yield us $6.4 million annually.  Our team also integrated rooftop garden towers and avocado and fruit trees, which would yield an extra half a million dollars annually.  Visitors ride a glass elevator up the vertical farm tower to a rooftop restaurant and garden, where they are served savory dishes with fresh produce directly from our vertical farm (Tower to Table), while enjoying sweeping views of the LA River.   

Team Three Design - Plan View

Team Three Design

Team Three Rendering by Jimmy from Perkins+Will

Collaborative Design Process

The first day's meeting point set the tone for the attendees, who for the most part were curious first-timers participating in Agritecture's design workshop.   From soil-based agriculture to a crash course in water-based agriculture, workshop participants were provided with the guidelines and required deliverables necessary to satisfy the judging criteria. Once the presentations were out of the way, we finally got a chance to personally meet the members of our respective teams, and loosely define a game-plan for the following day.

Leigh from Perkins+Will and Jen from RiverLA present @ LACI The second and final day of the workshop was held in the Los Angeles offices of Perkins + Will, a research-based architecture and design firm specializing in areas of sustainability, resilience, and health and wellness. Team 3 (our team) was designated a large desk in the northeast corner of the firm's office, with windows large enough to grant entry to morning sun's rays. Energized by the sun, we began brainstorming and soon allocating tasks to all members of the group.

Agritecture’s Andrew Blume advises team three Before joining the group in LA, I had made it clear to myself that winning was not the priority of this "friendly competition", but the ability to appreciate the gathering of like-minded people and being able to reach a common goal, and that was what Team 3 was able to accomplish. The synergy among the group allowed for respectful dialogue and last minute changes/additions to be easily incorporated into the final presentation. Occasional visits from the members of the Agritecture team helped guide and keep us focused as we got closer to our deadline. Working with a limited time-frame, architects Avideh and Jimmy were able to piece together fine computer-based architectural pieces, allowing Jerome, Niels, and Heather to focus on calculating numbers pertaining to leafy green and mushroom production costs, while Brian, Manuel, and Mishael mapped out a suitable marketing strategy.  As a team, we were keen on providing a solution that not only brought our vertical farming vision to life, but was also sensitive to the needs of the community.  Our final design proposal was a building that gently slopes up to become a tower - a glimpse into how urban agriculture could affect urban form in new and interesting ways.  

Colin Archipley delivers the event’s keynote speech

Giving Back

While the judges deliberated on which team would be crowned the winner, we heard a presentation by Farmer Ben from team one and from Community Healing Gardens. It was terrific to hear about how they support community through urban gardening, particularly with the garden they support at Edwin Markham Middle School in Watts. What was even more terrific was that at the conclusion of the workshop, the +Farm unit that was on display was donated to Edwin Markham Middle School.

Big shout out to all those who made the donation of this system happen including:

Transcend Lighting (LEDs)

Bluelab (sensor/controller)

No Stress Hydroponics (discounts on equipment)

Association for Vertical Farming (donated the racking)

Agritecture & Blue Planet Consulting (organized donation + paid for all additional expense)   

This +farm unit will be donated to Edwin Markham Middle School in Watts READ MORE ABOUT THE +FARM BEING RECOGNIZED BY THE WHITEHOUSE

In conclusion, the LA Agritecture Workshop was a valuable and fun experience. Thank you to Perkins+Will for sponsoring and hosting the workshop!

Team three poses with their prize, Hamama Greens

What follows is a team one recap: 

Our Mission

Team Agora-Culture’s objective was to convert an unused space in an underserved community into a space for science, education, learning, community-building, and nutritious food.  We were presented with the challenge of converting an underutilized parcel of land in the Cornfield Arroyo Seco zone into such a space.  The idea of a space that serves to both empower and strengthen the local community while simultaneously foster sustainable development resonated well with Team Agora-Culture.  We chose the name Agora-Culture because it reflects our allegorical comparison of our project to the Greek agora; an accessible space where community members gather to both sell fresh food and engage with one another.

Andreas from team one presents to the crowd

Our Vision

Our architects, engineers, and horticulturalists convened to produce a design that gracefully marries the traditional garden and farmers’ market atmosphere with high tech vertical aquaponic farming installations.  The design features a four story, U-shaped terraced building with rooftop garden that is surrounded by orchards and gardens that grow specialty produce.  The first story of the structure is an open-air farmers market that sells produce grown in the indoor aeroponic farms on the higher levels, the rooftop gardens, and the surrounding orchards.  We intended to make this space as accessible as possible; the aeroponic farms will serve as both active food production facilities and educational centers that will serve as a field trip venue for local grade schools.  To help Agora-Culture even better accommodate students as well as provide venue space for community events, we elected to include an event space on the roof in our design.

Agoura-Culture is structured as a nonprofit to ensure that it best serves the needs of the community.  Our nonprofit status would allow us to price food affordably and receive funding from government organizations and CSR.  This is integral to serving the needs of the community, because otherwise, we would be constrained by the expectations of investors and shareholders who may or may not share our vision.

Challenges and Solutions

Organization and time management were the two most challenging issues that our team faced.  We attempted to set ambitious goals and deadlines to keep everyone on task and productive, but we eventually found that our effort to do so was marred by a lack of organization despite our efforts.  We were having trouble deciding on several of the design elements of our structure, and this resulted in us losing time that could have been better dedicated to a few of the other deliverables.  It was eventually decided that it was necessary for us to default to the most complete idea we had contrived; this bought us enough time to complete all of our deliverables in a punctual manner.  Granted, if we had not spent so much time deliberating over design features, we would have likely been able to present higher quality deliverables.

Team one brainstorms the problems and solutions

About the Authors

Avideh Haghighi (Team 3)

“Avideh is a sustainability designer at Steinberg architects, passionate about making positive change in our built environment.  She is personally and professionally invested in creating an environmentally sustainable and socially equitable future through an understanding of buildings as a part of a dynamic socio-ecological system.  Through her leadership at the Los Angeles Living Building Challenge collaborative, she strives to facilitate the creation of living buildings and living communities in our region.”

Khaled Shames (Team 3) Khaled is an environmental horticulturist, paying close attention to the topic of food security in Kuwait and the surrounding region. Water is a precious resource in hyper-arid environments and, it is up to the agriculture sector to address and look to water-managing solutions while curbing dependence on imported goods. Providing the local population with quality nutrition is a passion of his.

Andreas George (Team 1)

Andreas is a recent graduate from Santa Clara University who came to the LA Workshop with 2 years of gardening and permaculture volunteer experience. While at the workshop, Andreas met one of the three judges, David Rosenstein from OurFoods. Andreas is now OurFoods newest employee.

You can review the RiverLA website and the Urban Ag Green Infrastructure Plan for more information on the LA River, and you can check out the below blog post by Leigh Christy of Perkins+Will. Leigh was a major contributor to the Urban Ag Plan and will be very active with the upcoming workshop.

What follows is Leigh’s blog post, originally posted here:

The much-maligned Los Angeles River flows 51 miles from its headwaters in the San Fernando Valley to the Pacific Ocean in Long Beach, capturing water from an 871-square mile region. Its path through the Los Angeles basin has varied widely throughout history, but in the 1930’s its current course was cemented – literally – by the Army Corps in an attempt to control seasonal flooding of the rapidly developing central city. As we face a growing number of examples of how this type of single-purpose man-made infrastructure ultimately fails to contain major storm events, it makes sense to explore a different approach to managing the River, specifically one that addresses flooding without exacerbating other problems. With this in mind, many Angelenos are actively lobbying for a transformation of our river into a valuable amenity that is integral to the welfare of the city as opposed to a “back-of-house” component of flood control infrastructure.

River-adjacent projects such as the PiggyBack Yard and the adaptive reuse of the historic Lincoln Heights Jail have helped Perkins+Will Los Angeles experience these issues first hand and given us the opportunity to illustrate how holistic sustainable thinking – both environmentally and socially – can enrich a site and a region. The massive PiggyBack Yard vision viewed Hurricane Katrina and other global storm events as a wake-up call to modernize city infrastructure to make it work with natural systems, not against them, while also creating a multivalent urban oasis in the process. On a smaller scale, the Lincoln Heights Jail is envisioned to be a transformative force in the neighborhood and region. It seeks to connect and incubate at multiple levels, with a focus on regenerating resources and sustaining economic and social viability.

Take water, for example. The Lincoln Heights Jail adaptive reuse concept couples program proposals with physical proposals in order to allow for the utilization of on-site water for the majority of its water use needs.  Two on-site loops are put forth: a food loop and a stormwater loop. The food loop showcases leading-edge urban agriculture strategies by combining aquaculture and hydroponic vegetative crop production into a highly sustainable aquaponic system. The stormwater loop begins with collecting water on the jail roof and surrounding site, then funneling it into a storage cistern. Separately, grey water from the domestic lavatories and showers – and potentially also black water from toilet fixtures – is treated in a biofiltration tank before joining the stormwater in the cistern for reuse in toilet fixtures as well as for irrigation of non-edible planting areas.

While these techniques help the Lincoln Heights Jail maximize its on-site water use, Southern California’s low rainfall rates makes this approach to water management an even more high-impact solution. In the long-term, site boundaries for the water system do not end at the property line. The Lincoln Heights Jail envisions itself fitting into a larger watershed framework that incorporates water run-off from surrounding streets, the city water supply, and the Los Angeles River.  For example, in a significant flooding event, a portion of the site is designed as a detention basin to absorb some of the peak river flow. Detained water is then stored to recharge the aquifer, with the possibility of reuse for site and public way irrigation.

While issues of water management are paramount to the design of any environmentally sensitive project, river adjacent projects should be especially proactive in taking advantage of the opportunity to also enable access to the waterfront, provide valuable open space, and support the re-stitching of a neighborhood’s social fabric. As both environmentally and socially regenerative solutions to disturbed ecosystems and blighted built environments, the overall “riverly” visions of projects such as the PiggyBack Yard and the Lincoln Heights Jail is to enable multifaceted natural and cultural growth.

In the end, the revitalization of the river can be argued from many viewpoints, from issues of water conservation to issues of flood control, from issues of social justice to issues of economic development. Why it should happen is obvious. What should happen becomes clearer with every project proposal. In the near future, the key to success will be defining how to effectively engage a multitude of voices in search of a shared solution with a multiplicity of purpose.  We encourage you to share your thoughts below.

This post was co-authored with Shawn Godkin.

POSTED: April 11, 2013 | By: Leigh Christy