Urban food production is not a new concept. We’ve seen countless designs here on eVolo for vertical farms, urban ecosystems, and arcologies, but French firm Zundel and Cristea has taken the urban farm concept in an entirely different direction. Instead of proposing a monumental project like a vertical farm, they put together a design for smaller urban farm centers planted throughout a city.

The centers are designed to grow food, process it, and some to even serve it in on site restaurants. On the inside bowls of the spiraling structures is the green space where various types of food and greenery is grown. Visitors and urban farmers would go out to the spirals to harvest and enjoy the green space. Food would then be taken into the superstructure and processed where it could be served or packaged and brought to market.

The small scale of each of the double spiral structures allow for Zundel and Cristea’s urban farms to be regional centers for the districts they individually serve, a sort of park and bazaar in one. Placing them in urban landscapes also reduces the green house emissions that would normally be needed to transport produce from rural farms to city centers. Centers would be topped with wind turbines as well, to create an energy sustainable landmark that is economically, socially, and agriculturally productive.

Zundel and Cristea designed their urban farms as a part of what they see as a shifting focus of city planning and architectural design from industrial functionality to the environmentally conscious and ecological. Their straightforward and refined design makes urban farming on a large scale a feasible element in the city of the future.

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