The Case Studies Of Urban Garden Horticulture In China And Overseas

There is a convention in cropping that vegetables,fruits and flowers are mostly grown in countrysides or suburbs.As a result,agricultural space in urban areas has not been utilized sufficiently,e.g,agricultural land is in small fragments distributed over the city.One measure against this situation is to enhance the role of those fragments in socializing and education for citizens more than in producing crops,vegetables and fruits.However,there are still other challenges should be tackled,e.g.,the continuous increasing of population does not only promote the urbanization,but also reduce agricultural workers and cultivated areas.Moreover,currently most vegetable production bases located in suburbs have exposed a series of food safety issues,such as misuse of pesticides and pollution of fertilizers.Keeping aforementioned challenges in mind,through studying foreign vertical farming theories and cases,we believe that building vertical farms offers a new direction for the development of urban agriculture that helps to overcome those challenges,although currently building vertical farms extensively takes time considering that it is still in exploratory period and very expensive.Meanwhile,by investigating the phenomenon that several organic farms get popular in some medium-sized cities,we find that due to the high price and unstable production highly affected by the weather,delivering farm produce directly to consumers from farms only gets accepted by a small part of consumers.This indicates that there are adequate space for the continuous developing of organic agricultural products,and the developing should become better and better since with the improvement of people's consumption level,the demand for organic products will gradually increase.In consequence,this thesis starts to explore how to make the production sites diverse via developing and making good use of new agricultural space in urban areas.There are several promising methods,e.g.,building farms in residential ares where households get concentrated,deploying planting plots to build house gardens via using balcony space.Moreover,abandoned land in or around the cities can also be used to grow crops,which can satisfy residents' food self-sufficiency as well as fulfill some old people's desire of labor.In addition,constructing vegetable gardens on the roofs of buildings is also feasible,which can bring some additional advantages,e.g.,reducing heat on roofs in summer thus making energy consumption of air conditions less,absorbing rainwater and slowing flow rate of sewer water thus benefiting building "sponge cities".Finally,making use of free space in various campuses,which are distributed over the city in every corner,as agricultural land also contributes to increase the urban greening and unify the urban ecosystem.To this end,this thesis is mainly focused on developing free roofs in cities as agricultural land.Some flat roofs satisfy the requirements of load-bearing and have good conditions for waterproofing,thus leaving them free is neither economic nor friendly to environmental protection.Constructing vegetable gardens on roofs accommodates the norm of roof greening,the policy of promoting the development of house farms published by the Ministry of Agriculture,and the direction of developing "sponge cities"proposed by the government.By analyzing several classic urban garden horticulture l projects at home and abroad,it is reasonable to conclude that developing vegetable gardens at roof is feasible and promising.E.g.,Xintiandi farm community in Wuhan,which is the fitst one successfully developed in China,is promising to bring demonstration effects as an exemplar with attracting more real estate developers to introduce agricultural areas into districts,as well as combine production landscapes and residential landscapes when performing landscape design,in addition to reaching the national greening standard.Finally,with investigating organic farms in major cities and prototype projects of urban agriculture conducted by some cities,this thesis demonstrates the prospect of developing vegetable gardens on the roof of buildings in Anhui Agricultual University locating around the center of Hefei City,which can be further extended to reform free rooftops into agricultural areas over the City.