Garden City 2050

Abstract

By the year 2050, this planet will house nine billion people. The Dutch population is expected to increase from 16,3 million in 2018 to 17,6 million people in 2050.

The current ‘foodprint’ of Amsterdam is not sustainable and will not provide the solution to feed the one million inhabitants of Amsterdam in 2050 and the decades to come.

The municipality of Amsterdam endorses the above problem and therefore supports the development of creating ‘Food Hubs’: centres where combinations of advanced food production, processing, consumption, education and knowledge become available for the Amsterdam citizens.

Next to that, the municipality of Amsterdam envisions that the suspected increase of inhabitants and thus densification should take place within twelve designated locations of growth ‘groeilocaties’.

One of those locations is the Amstel area. The Amstel area is known for its garden villages and gardening culture and thus the excellent location for the Garden City 2050 with its Green Garden Grocery School and the Green Machine. These buildings together form this graduation project.

The Green Garden Grocery School is the building where primary school children of the Amstel neighbourhood are educated in the future of food production in order to create community support for producing fresh food on a large scale and literally seed awareness for a more intensive and advanced gardening culture. This school provides the Green Machine with cuttings and seeds.

The Green Machine is the building in which many new ways of future food production are designed and exposed to the public. It functions as a machine of fresh local food, since it houses a large scale fish, crustaceans and sea weed farm, a vertical vegetable farm with an insect farm on top. All products are grown via a circular sustainable aquaponics system. Walking along a green track from ground floor to the roof, visitors and locals can observe and learn more about all sorts of new food production techniques. They can buy their fresh groceries in the ‘cooling cubes’ of the 24/7 ground floor market place and taste and order the future food in many different restaurants on the first floor. This diversity of functions creates a solid base to intensify and elaborate on the existing gardening culture of
Amstel.

Both buildings function totally of the grid through an underground water and heat storage system, a circular water system, a double skin façade, gas production of algae and compost, and integrated solar roof panels.

These buildings together provide local fresh food for half the Amstel population in 2050, every day.