FUTURE OF LONDON In Tokyo, HR recruitment company Pasona has a green wall of plants on the side of its building, tomato vines above conference tables and fresh fruit grown on-site in the cafeteria. Berlin’s urban landscaper InFarm creates mini indoor vertical farms for supermarkets to attract new customers with on-site-grown produce.
These at-scale schemes are not simply for nourishment, sustainability, or cost-saving exercises – although they can be. Instead urban farms can boost brands and enhance the design of buildings.
Investor and developer caution
Panelists at the Future of London debate “Feeding the city: the future of urban food and technology” say there is huge potential for agriculture and food spaces in London. Investor and developer caution is a barrier, but they say there is value in food for the property industry.
Sarah Hughes, Nuffield Farming scholar and owner of Eat My Flowers, points to the poster children of urban farming in Tokyo and Berlin. She says these buildings boast an “intangible value” and says the model can work in a variety of businesses and scenarios.
“If you look at large-scale developments, whether residential or mixed-use, you can integrate these growing techniques to complement the commercial and the marketing aims of the development,” says Hughes.
Kate Hofman, chief executive and co-founder of GrowUp Urban Farms, says there are two ways of doing this: installing refrigerated systems like InFarm’s, or allowing space for people to grow food themselves. The latter has the added benefit of community cohesion.
“There’s a lot of untapped opportunity for real estate in London to bring food and community together,” she says. “It’s not just about spaces for growing, but spaces for cooking and eating.”
Measuring value
Why the resistance then? The panelists acknowledge that property in London is expensive, there are zoning and regulation rules, and developers may be reluctant to include urban farms in mixed-use schemes with little obvious financial incentive.
Hofman says conversations in real estate tend to focus on monetisation: rental values or commercial sales of produce, as opposed to added value.
“In London, urban farming tends to be about using spaces that are available to grow food either as part of a community-based educational project or in a more commercial way to serve a particular market,” she says. But commercial ventures are not a viable solution.
Hofman says GrowUp’s commercial vertical farm in London, Unit 84, closed owing to high costs, which prevented the organisation from competing at scale on food prices.
“For London, it didn’t make sense for us commercially to have those operations in the city. To be able to compete on the actual food price we needed to be able to do that at a much more industrial scale, and to have that space we needed to go outside the city.”
The benefits of creating urban farms and incorporating food distribution and waste reduction initiatives in dense cities are not short-term cash-savers. These strategies have longer-term advantages, supporting mental health, building communities for employees and residents, and providing new amenities in the city. There are urban farms, food distribution and waste reduction initiatives, but at the moment in London they are still small-scale.
Saasha Celestial-One, co-founder of food-sharing app Olio, says: “How do you take the learnings from one particular space and then scale them up effectively in a way that makes sense from a commercial perspective and is self-sustaining?
“I don’t know if it’s because we lack infrastructure to do that at a city-wide level to facilitate that,” she says.
Financial model
Hughes adds: “Our role is to try to convince investors what the value is. You need to try to put that into a financial model that investors can understand.” This means finding a way to quantify the benefits to clients, encouraging investment on schemes or in small start-up companies through subsidised development or co-location.
“It’s not per se the value of a piece of lettuce, it’s more than that. What’s the value of a gym or nice decor in a development? You must quantify that to build it in, so why can’t you put a value on having a food source?”
Hofman says: “The value of having food production is not necessarily about the commercial value of the food, it’s the equivalent of having a feature that creates a space that people want to live and work in.”
The panel
- Nicky Wightman, director, global occupier trends, Savills (moderator)
- Saasha Celestial-One, co-founder, Olio
- Kate Hofman, chief executive and co-founder, GrowUp Urban Farms
- Sarah Hughes, Nuffield Farming scholar and owner of Eat My Flowers
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