A smart city often signifies a digitalised cyberville, a chipped and wired electronic community or knowledge based ubiquitous city.We visualize energy efficient techno-towers, receptions without receptionists and self-driving smart cars.
UrbanFeed’s value proposition is to develop smart integrated blue-green units for large-scale urban food production with a minimum use of energy and close to zero CO2 emissions.
Better ICT-solutions and digitalization is great, but aren’t we overlooking a vital aspect of intelligent city life? More than 70% of us human beings will live in cities. From a sustainability point of view, that is a smart move. On the other hand; these cities are responsible for 75% of the world’s energy consumption and 80% of the greenhouse gases.
That’s not smart.
At present it seems we are building cities for social and ecological catastrophes. At the same time, we experience an increasing interest in creating/recreating cityscapes on a human scale. Yes; city planners should focus more on solutions for smart human beings than on the technology itself, but we need to exceed that goal and ask: How can we feed this increasing amount of mouths with healthy, fresh food in the years to come?
Dr. Parag Khanna states that both subsidence and rising sea levels already threaten the utility of entire urban habitats. He foresees that in 2050, engineers will be hard at work transplanting sinking districts of our many coastal mega-cities both further inland and on to floating mega-structures.
In the meantime: let us build our cities and technologies more in line with nature’s premises for all life forms. UrbanFeed’s solution is a Kinder Egg – meeting the need for economical, ecological and social performance and sustainability.
How so?
Food security, sustainability and physical safety are standards UrbanFeed seek to implement – with year round production, regardless of weather conditions.
The architecture consists of a transparent building envelope developed by SolaRoof. The exterior covering material is a transparent, strong fibre fabric with light transmission about the same as a single glass glazing. The inner skin (creating a bubble cavity between the two layers) is a clear film. The bubble technology has proven high insulation value and plays a decisive role in controlling the indoor growth climate. In addition to providing large crops of nutritious food, the SolaRoof solution also contributes to clean energy and a substantial excess of pure water. In brief, SolaRoof has developed a regenerative, sun-powered, photosynthesis driven energy system for life support.
The seafood production unit is developed and delivered by AquaOptima, a supplier of RAS (recirculation aquaculture systems). AqO has designed and supplied hatcheries and grow-out land-based farms worldwide for a variety of cold and warm water species with experience in farming of Atlantic Cod, Atlantic Salmon and Barramundi.
Altran Norway delivers The OptiFeed, a specially designed and developed cloud-based proprietary sensor and control system, which monitors and regulates all the systems in the UrbanFeed unit.
The OptiFeed integrates and uses data from the various UrbanFeed sensors. Conventional NFT (Nutrient Film Technique) and Fish Farming systems are in constant flow and operate 24/7, while UrbanFeed is responsive to the actual environment around the plants in Real Time, using state of the art machine learning and artificial Intelligence. Rather than a fixed time and volume, a proprietary sensor monitors the environment around a plant provides irrigation based on the plant’s size, growth, and metabolism and real-time requirements. All UrbanFeed units will be monitored by OptiFeed which ensures best practices are shared and creates a self –learning system for optimal production.
The OptiFeed is responsible for monitoring and controlling CO2, pH, humidity, temperature and more and allows for optimal growing conditions.
UrbanFeed wants to contribute to redefining our concepts of smart urban living through developing this integrated, circular solution for food production, waste management and clean water, with a “bio-regenerative” energy system – independent of fossil energy and petrochemicals.
We are now in an incubator phase as a participant in NCE Smart Incubator Halden. UrbanFeed is supported by Innovation Norway's Environmental Technology Program, a program substantially strengthened by the Norwegian Government in 2016.
Our aim is to build an UrbanFeed Demonstration project, which is essential to create a future replicable, pre-engineered and prefabricated package of technology components within a closed ecosystem, where one system feeds the other, with zero carbon footprint and zero GHG emissions.
I like beautiful vertical buildings, trendy street-level bars and creative chefs – you get the picture; and I am a foresighted believer in ”the birds and the bees, the flowers and the trees” – in smart cityscapes, where natural life and circular economy is supported and thriving. Optimization of growth conditions is key both to thriving crops and thriving businesses.
My personal slogan is KISSSS: keep it simple, smart, safe, sustainable!
So why don’t you start with the simple part and check out UrbanFeed’s video at www.urbanfeed.no?
The UrbanFeed-team is making a serious effort to address the issue of making our urban habitats productive, environmentally friendly, healthy and beautiful.
After all, aesthetics is the true mother of ethics.
Rita Westvik,
Co-founder and general manager at UrbanFeed. Wesvik has experience from SINTEF, The Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation, The Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Norwegian Ministry of Health and Social Affairs.