Tokyo Babylon

Continuing on with my idea for making a change is rather difficult. Ideally I would like to assemble a multidisciplinary team to develop ideas until they are marketable. I’m not sure how realistic this is, but perhaps you can decide?

In order to starts a roof farming business we’d need a number of specialists, but it wouldn’t be like an ordinary business, in many respects since we’d be selling a technological fix and then making money from it as an ongoing service. However farming in all circumstances is a multi-purpose enterprise that provides all sorts of services only some of which have ever brought a financial return to the farmer. Now that got me thinking, since a lot of that is changing. The natural environment as a service provider is gaining wider acceptance.

New York when they found out the hills which they got their water from were about to be bought and the woods on them clear felled they asked ecologists and engineers to map out the consequences for the city’s water supply. They discovered that buying the land and preserving it would be cheaper than building the dams, water plants and other infrastructure. Nature supplies water services cheaper than engineers. Could it work on rooftops? I think it can.

Greenhouse Gas Emissions are in the news a lot as well, but now there are carbon credit exchanges where preservation efforts have a dollar value attached to them. Farmers could benefit from this as well, and carbon reduction is easier in the cities. Ask any environmentalist and they will tell you that cities are black holes upon the landscape, sucking in resources from the surrounding lands, and with globalisation this means planetwide.

Doing this kind of thing in the countryside runs into all sorts of problems, such as rural depopulation, land abandonment, problems that are not concentrated geographically or intense enough to make money out of. Cities are different though. The scale of the problems are massive and they are multidimensional, which some would see as a problem, but which if you think about it is really an opportunity in disguise.

A rooftop farm is a multipurpose piece of kit, what academics would call a  ‘multifunctional construct or artifact’ but I like to speak in plain English, though I do wax lyrical at times. The trick is to think of all the problems you have in cities and ask why at least six times (this is a trick the smart people at Toyota do to perfect their Toyota Production System, a system that has made them the most profitable car maker on the planet).

Let’s look at Tokyo and then examine some of the problems…

Air Quality is poor.

Why is it poor? There’s too much being burned. Why is there too much being burned? Because it’s outstripping the absorption capacity of the environment. Why is it outstripping the absorption capacity? Because there’s not enough greenery to absorb it? Why is there not enough greenery? Because there’s not too many buildings. Why are buildings an obstacle to greenery? Because they’re not constructed with greenery in mind.  - Rooftop Farms.

Tokyo’s Heat Island Effect.

Why is Tokyo much hotter than the surrounding countryside in Summer? Because the buildings heat up and need to be cooled by AC units which pump hot air into the environment, on top of the radiant effect of stone and concrete. Why do the buildings need AC units? Because they are a thermal mass that absorbs heat from sunshine and radiates it into the building. Thus reduce the amount of absorption by insulating the roof and walls with a reflective surface. Sounds expensive? Ivy down the walls and a rooftop farm. AC bills go down, indeed you’ve probably shaded the AC unit so it doesn’t waste energy cooling itself. Less need to pump warm air out means less AC use, less AC use means less heat pumped into the environment. It seems to me that most modern building are basically solar cookers with extraction fans. Instead of using energy to offset a design flaw, why not redesign post construction by adding a rooftop farm as a modular addition. If you can spread the idea like a virus, or a Youtube top 10 video, then you can make a real difference.

Ok, air quality and heat island..

Lack of Green Space

This is really a big problem in Tokyo. You won’t find allotments or communal gardens anywhere. If there’s such a thing as a City Farm in Tokyo I shudder to think what the land tax would be. So problem is cant garden. Why? No land available. Why? Too many buildings? Buildings with flat roofs? Why not transplant the soil from below the building to the roof? And grow things with it. Would people pay for a farm. I think they would. Just take a look around Shibuya and you’ll see acres and acres of flat roof but no green.

Lack of Natural Amenity - Rooftop Farms

Static property prices - Rooftop Farm/Garden

Unemployed former office workers - Social Amenity.

Power spikes in Summer and Winter - Insulation - Rooftop Farms

Canalized rivers (every river in Tokyo is basically a concrete ditch) - slow water release - rooftop garden/farm. Reducing the need for surge capacity by reducing the surge (slow release from rooftops) would allow more nature into the city. Increasing amenity.

Garbage disposal- Rooftop manure piles/worm farms. No organic waste leaves the building.

Low Income Families - Grow your own food - Rooftop farm.

As I see it it’s a power surge solution, a water management solution,  a green space shortage solution, a static building value solution, a rental company static profit solution, a low income family financial solution, a heat island solution, an air quality solution.

Now the thing is to get the power company to pay, the water board to pay, the city government to pay, landlords to pay, would be farmers to pay etc, carbon credit exchanges to pay. Bring all that together and you have a business where all you do is build the farm and then take a cut. Use the money to build more and you’ve got yourself a city that’s worth living in.