Indoor Vertical Farming

In 2017-2018, I acted as principal investigator (PI) for the collaborative research and communication project "Cultivating Engagement: a citizen participation forum on vertical farming" that was funded by EIT Food (European Institute of Innovation & Technology - Food), and of which you can find more infos here. Together with an industry partner in the Netherlands and science communication partner in Belgium, we explored various formats of public engagement in various museums across Europe (Deutsches Museum in Munich, Science Museum in London, and the Design Museum in Den Bosch) on a thus far widely unknown form of urban food production.

 

I published results of this project in an article called "Vanguard Visions of Vertical Farming: Envisaging and Contesting an Emerging Food Production System" in Science, Technology & Human Value where I explore vertical farming as a future vision of food production cultivated by a small, heterogeneous group of sociotechnical vanguards: startup entrepreneurs, scientists, venture capitalists, consultants, and the like.

 

With Laurie Waller, I published results of developed public engagement formats through social media in an article for the journal Public Understanding of Science. For this project I was also interviewed by the research magazine Faszination Forschung of the Technical University Munich, explaining the prophecies and pitfalls of this new proposition for urban food production. I am currently working on two other publications, with one exploring the dominant problem-framing among sociotechnical vanguards of vertical farming. The other paper discusses what it means to 'open up' a food growth system that is often controlled, highly automated, with operations generally closed to the wider public.

 

I was invited to speak at the Skyberries Summer Academy of the vertical farm institute in Austria in September 2018, at the Designing Urban Natures-Cultures conference at the Technical University Munich in October 2018, the EAT Festival at the BIOTOPIA Natural History Museum in Munich (May 2019), and to give a talk at the Summer School Responsible Research, Innovation and Transformation in Food, Plant and Energy sciences at the Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center in September 2021 (virtual). I also presented on this topic at the European Association for the study of Science and Technology (EASST) in Lancaster (2018), at Society for the Social Studies of Science (4s) annual conference in New Orleans (2019), and at the University of Ottawa Planthropolab in April 2021. Related to the topic of controlled indoor food production, together with Laurie Waller I also organized a conference panel on public engagement on food and technoscience at the EASST (2018), and with Alex Rewagan a panel on controlled plant growth and environments at the 4s (2018). In fall 2021, I will be discussing vertical farming in the context of Canadian agricultural policy as part of the University of Ottawa AI + Society Alex Trebek forum for dialogue.