In Newark, New Jersey, a large and deceptively nondescript building is redefining the Garden State, producing millions of pounds of food per year just outside of Manhattan. This 70,000 square foot facility has the equivalent yield of over 5 million square feet of traditional farmland. Inside, a year-round, closed-loop aeroponics system employs no pesticides and requires 95% less water than field farming. This branch of AeroFarms is not alone — it’s part of a food production revolution with projects ranging from at-home and in-store micro-farms to massive facilities set up in old factories and warehouses around the world.

Technically, vertical farming can be done outside, too, by stacking planters in natural sunlight, but indoor vertical farms offer a range of advantages. Inside, there are no seasons and specialized LED lights make it possible to grow plants continuously and cycle through various crops more easily. The controlled environment and standardization of these systems also makes automation easier. In Japan, approaches have gone predictably high-tech, with endeavors like the Vegetable Factory, which is operated entirely by robots.

Spatial containment makes recycling more efficient, mitigates spoilage and reduces the risk of diseases and pests spreading beyond a specific facility. Transportation costs and energy requirements are also reduced for farms that move into old factories and warehouses right in and around cities, putting them closer to consumers. Aeroponics in general also require less material input — mainly mist and air with minimal water and soil — leading to a lighter footprint.

What started in large and independent facilities has begun to spread into mainstream grocery stores and supermarkets, too. A few years back, Target started testing direct retail micro-farms, beginning with leafy greens before moving to tomatoes, peppers and more. Since these kinds of retail spaces are climate-controlled already for the sake of both shoppers and products, less added energy is required to maintain ideal conditions.

In Berlin, a company called INFARM recently partnered with local shops to provide similar in-store services, cutting down on farm-to-table distance right in the heart of a major European metropolis. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, vertical creepers, rice paddies and broccoli fields were integrated into the design of an otherwise Modern-looking office building, brightening up the place while also providing food for the employee cafeteria.

Taking vertical integration a step further, projects like the ReGen Villages aim to incorporate stacked farms directly into residential communities. It may sound impractical or even Utopian, but at its root the idea is relatively traditional: backyard gardens and community gardening are nothing new. Coupled with walkability and density, these kinds of green-centric towns have a lot in common with New Urbanist ideas that go back decades.

Still, it is generally wise to maintain a healthy skepticism when it comes to fresh green architectural trends and technologies and eye-catching renderings. Skyscrapers covered in greenery (or treescrapers), for instance, have proven to be popular but also problematic in practice (catchy conceptual earthscrapers, groundscrapers and sidescrapers, too, for that matter). Sometimes, more practical organic solutions are hiding in plain sight. Take wood, for instance, a historically popular green building material now finding new forms and reaching new heights in tall buildings around the world. Newer is not always better.

Some extreme vertical farming ideas may indeed prove to be far-fetched and unsustainable, but market movements suggest there is a future in these kinds of facilities and approaches. Investors are putting their money where people’s mouths are, buying up disused urban real estate and developing new indoor farming technologies. Already, vertical farming is a $2,000,000,000 industry and experts project it will grow as much as 30% per year over the next decade.

Vertical farms are of course not a complete solution to ongoing threats like climate change and mounting global food crises, but they do show promise — these endeavors are slowly breaking down urban and rural barriers, reconnecting cities with the food sources that sustain them and shortening that critical distance from farm to table.

The United States currently has a shortage of about 7.2 million affordable and available rental homes for households with incomes at or below the poverty level, a statistic that’s clearly linked to the homelessness crisis. Meanwhile, 8 million Americans spend more than half of their monthly income on rent.

To house those most urgently in need as well as the people who make just enough money to fall through the cracks, cities have to start building more affordable housing as quickly as possible. But that doesn’t mean they should slap up some public housing towers and call it good. To be successful, affordable housing has to offer more than just shelter; it has to be thoughtfully designed to provide a good quality of life to its inhabitants.

In the U.S., the few affordable housing developments that exist often feel like fenced-off prisons, reflecting common attitudes about poverty rooted in the just-world hypothesis – the assumption that, essentially, people get what they deserve. Barriers to creating more affordable housing include city and state regulations that prioritize profitability for developers, and severe cuts to federal housing programs proposed by the current administration.

But some cities are forging their own paths. New York City has set out to build and preserve 300,000 units of affordable housing by 2026, and its Public Design Commission (PDC) published design guidelines for that goal that could become a blueprint for the entire nation.

More Than Shelter: Defining Successful Affordable Housing

“Designing New York: Quality Affordable Housing” lays out best practices in planning affordable housing that “contributes to the quality, character, diversity and experience of New York City’s communities” while improving equity, resiliency, sustainability and health for residents and neighborhoods. The developments should foster density and encourage interaction while presenting inviting, warm, safe and dignified living spaces that are durable, easy to maintain, attractive and accessible by transit, car, bike and on foot. Oh, and they have to be budget-friendly to build, too.

That may sound like a tall order, but the guide includes seven case studies of existing developments that tick off all of these boxes and more, and there’s no reason their success can’t be replicated elsewhere while also being tailored specifically to each location and population. Utopian dreams of affordable housing communities have certainly fallen flat before, like the spectacular failure of the modernist Pruitt-Igoe Housing Project in St. Louis, Missouri, but today most of them read like warnings of what not to do. While the future of affordable housing may center upon open-source technological solutions, PDC’s guide is a step in the right direction that can be acted upon right now, adding to the general discourse about what makes affordable housing successful.

Community-Oriented & Woven Through the Urban Fabric

Integrating affordable housing into the community instead of setting it apart is a great place to start. Not only should they offer easy circulation into transit and segue culturally and aesthetically into existing neighborhoods, they should respond to the priorities of the communities they serve. PDC cites the Frost Street Apartments, a 7-story, 47-unit complex in a gentrified area of Brooklyn by Curtis + Ginsberg Architects as an example.

Not only does it complement the typologies of surrounding architecture and avoid a monolithic appearance with setbacks and a variety of facade colors, it roots affordability into Williamsburg by housing people with incomes at 50%, 60% and 80% of the area median, with eight units set aside for adults with developmental disabilities. On-site support services are available, and residents enjoy bike storage, lots of natural light, bamboo flooring and open kitchens; five percent of the units are pre-adapted to be handicapped accessible.

“How can a building contribute to a sense of community, and help its residents regain stable, independent lives?” asks the Public Design Commission. The Schermerhorn in Brooklyn helps answer that question with 180 studio units for low-income residents and 9 multi-person suites with shared kitchens and bathrooms for formerly homeless single adult residents, all set along day-lit corridors. Preference is given to those working in the performing arts.

The building’s ground floor is home to a dance studio as well as the Mark O’Donnell Theater at The Actors Fund Arts Center, hosting performances by residents, and the entire second floor is devoted to shared spaces, social services and a rear terrace. It’s visually striking, too, cantilevered over a subway tunnel with a facade defined by five vertical channel glass panels.

Sustainability Means Addressing Health, Too

Making a structure sustainable requires more than just going down a checklist of physical attributes. Sustainability should address the health and well-being of inhabitants, too. While the Creston Avenue Residence in the Bronx may include rooftop solar panels, green roofs, low-VOC finishes, formaldehyde-free materials and a rainwater harvesting system, making it one of the few LEED Platinum Certified supportive housing buildings in the United States, it also incorporates community rooms and amenities that open onto a rear courtyard landscaped with native plants, offers lots of views of the neighborhood and encourages the use of stairways.

This building provides housing to people who are chronically homeless or in danger of being homeless, veterans with housing vouchers and households meeting income eligibility requirements, and offers support services to residents. It’s the first building funded by the New York State Medicaid Redesign Team Supporting Housing Initiative, which recognizes housing as a social determinant of health.

Another example cited by PDC is Arbor House in the Bronx by Bernstein Associates, a state of the art affordable housing complex that incorporates a 10,000-square-foot hydroponic rooftop farm that provides fresh produce like lettuce and herbs to tenants. Built in an area where residents have lower life expectancies and higher rates of preventable chronic diseases compared to New Yorkers in wealthier neighborhoods, Arbor House offers an indoor gym, a wide, central day-lit stairway, an outdoor fitness circuit and organic-themed artwork by a local artist to help give the building a sense of identity.

Smart Use of Land and Materials

For Navy Green, a 433-unit building in Brooklyn by FXCollaborative, Curtis + Ginsberg Architects and Architecture in Formation, one key to affordability was the choice to transform a contaminated brownfield into a building that takes up almost an entire city block to accommodate residents with a wide range of incomes and needs. Owned by the city, the land was once a naval prison.

After rehabilitation, it’s a series of four apartment buildings (low-income rental, mixed-income rental, mixed-income condominium and a supportive housing residence) that form a perimeter around a shared green. The buildings are strategically designed to block views of the adjacent Brooklyn-Queens Expressway and a 15-story Navy Yard warehouse. The distinctive facades of each individual building make the complex seem like it was developed over time.

While located in a waterfront neighborhood that’s susceptible to flooding, the Hunter’s Point South Commons and Crossing building by Ismael Leyva Architects and SHoP Architects in Long Island City offers affordable and income-restricted units stunning views while building flood potential into the design. Critical infrastructure is raised to higher elevations and the building is capable of withstanding substantial water loads, with temporary flood barriers integrated into the ground floor.

Of course, these projects don’t just spring up out of nowhere. Many of them receive special state or city funding and are built on land already owned by the city, circumventing a lot of common obstacles to building new affordable housing. But they also address affordability in a holistic way that benefits the city as a whole, avoiding the segregation of low-income residents from the rest of the population and improving their lives in the process.

Designing and constructing affordable housing also requires taking a hard look at what the word ‘affordable’ actually means in relation to the real and growing issue of income inequality in the United States. But the PDC’s “Designing New York: Quality Affordable Housing” gives us a strong foundation for a future of affordable housing that could also include lots of modular, 3D-printed and otherwise technologically advanced structures.

The way we design and engage with our built environments will rapidly change as we grapple with climate change and develop new technological innovations, and in some cases, radical new ideas will be required. The annual skyscraper design competition held by eVolo recognizes visionary ideas for high-rise projects that challenge our understanding of vertical architecture and its relationship with both nature and existing cities. Here are this year’s winners along with 7 honorable mentions, including an Antarctic skyscraper attempting to reverse global warming, research facilities housed in the trunks of Sequoia trees, and vertically stacked factories sharing smart waste disposal and recycling techniques.

First Place: Mashambas Skyscraper

Based on the Swahili word for ‘an area of cultivated land’ often including the dwelling of the farmer, ‘Mashambas’ by Polish designers Pawel Lipinksi and Mateusz Frankowski aims to bring the green revolution of expanded harvests to the poorest people so they can produce surplus food for themselves and their neighbors, helping to eradicate poverty and hunger in their communities. The skyscraper itself is a “movable educational center” providing education, training on agricultural techniques, cheap fertilizers, modern tools and a local trading area, and it’s made of simple modular elements that can expand or disassemble as needed.

Second Place: Vertical Factories in Megacities

In decades past, prior to a round of improvements that made them far less noisy and polluting, factories were often relegated to land outside cities, requiring workers to commute long distances or move to suburban areas. But we don’t exactly want them taking up valuable square footage in urban areas, either. This concept by Tianshu Liu and Linshen Xie stacks them on top of each other like a towering sandwich so they can all take advantage of the same modern technologies for waste removal, potentially even transforming those waste products into clean heat, electricity, fertilizer and water.

Third Place: Espiral3500

In ‘La Albufera,’ a coastal area of Spain located within a natural agricultural park, a rapid increase in tourism during the summer has led to speculation-based development, threatening the very characteristics that make it so attractive in the first place. Population increases up to 1000% in some areas during high tourist season, and they empty out in winter. The Espiral3500 concept aims to meet the needs of tourists while protecting the natural resources of the territory via vertical growth, packing private and public spaces into a skyscraper with an ‘inverted street’ system. Visitors can wind their way up to the top, enjoying a wide range of shops, restaurants and hotels while taking in the view.

Honorable Mention: Arch Skyscraper

The basis of the Arch Skyscraper is envisioned as “an arch that undergoes transformations through the changes of light, human behavior, and other factors to form different spaces/units, which overlap one another vertically to form the final design.” Double-layer arches inspired by those found in medieval cathedrals and ancient Chinese pagodas are combined with vertical transportation, creating a series of vaulted spaces that are fun to explore.

Honorable Mention: The Forgotten Memorials

Noting that in the past, older architecture was often demolished to make way for the new in the constant cycle of urbanization, the designers of The Forgotten Memorials skyscraper concept propose requiring every generation to construct new buildings underneath the older ones. This could help preserve the past while accommodating the future on limited land. “They gradually, generation by generation, penetrate the clouds and become memorials beyond the sky.”

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Visionary High Rises Winners Of The 2017 Evolo Skyscraper Competition

The future of urban living (at least for the wealthy) is looking pretty lush, with residential towers finding new and creative ways to incorporate greenery, maximize views and give residents the feel of a spacious suburban backyard hundreds of feet in the air. Many of these buildings are pushing new technologies, including novel modular plug-and-play solutions, 3D-printed prefab parts and integrated ecosystem design. As unrealistic as some of the renderings may look at a glance, these towers are becoming a reality, some set to be completed as soon as 2017.

Fake Hills by MAD Architects, Beihai, China

One of those renderings that looked too fantastical to be real, ‘Fake Hills’ by MAD Architects is almost fully complete in the coastal Chinese city of Beihai. The development is part of a planned, built-from-scratch city featuring dense housing in architecturally innovative form along with a lush green landscape. The continuous roof platform running along the top will eventually be planted with gardens, too, and feature tennis courts and swimming pools.

Grove at Grand Bay by BIG, Miami

BIG’s recently completed ‘Grove at Grand Bay’ in Miami is true to its renderings, down to the undulating planted areas at the base. The pair of twisting towers is actually a luxury ‘low density’ project featuring 98 units topped with dual level penthouses and containing seven swimming pools, a spa and fitness center, and an on-site art gallery in what could be perceived as stacked mansions for a dense urban setting.

Gridded Residential Tower by C.F. Møller and Brut, Antwerp

This ‘vertical community’ by C.F. Møller is a residential and mixed-use tower that was “developed from the inside out,” placing an emphasis on social qualities, aiming for a suburban quality of life. The 24-story complex contains 116 homes, retail outlets, offices and communal areas, including enclosed winter gardens at each end of the tower and a shared 5th floor facility with a landscaped roof terrace. The envelope of the structure contains balconies enclosed within glass, an interstitial area between architecture and facade spacious enough for kids to play.

Farmanieh Residential Tower by ZAAD Studio and Marz Design, Tehran

The form of this residential tower by ZAAD is pretty unusual, featuring a series of modular units wedged between stacked circular platforms to create a patchwork of indoor and outdoor areas. Also set to the scale of a suburban home, the units offer a comfortable living environment and highly varied views of the city intermixed with spacious terraces in the voids between modules.

Vertical Forest Tower by Stefano Boeri, Lausanne

Critics have questioned whether this ‘vertical forest tower’ by Stefano Boeri is an ‘Alice in Renderland’ kind of concept, especially considering that the trees pictured along the peripheral areas of the structure would need a much deeper root system and lots more soil than the design allows. The vision of such large-scale greenery seems pretty unrealistic, especially given the high demand for water and the inevitable strain on the supporting structures. But we’ve been surprised before, and the tower is under construction with a completion date set for 2017, so we’ll soon find out. If they work, the green additions will help create shade and filter air pollution.

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Future Cities 313 Fresh New Visions For Residential Towers

At the convergence of the localvore and vertical farming movements, Target’s new in-store micro-farms are positioned to offer the freshest possible produce to consumers. On offer: leafy greens and herbs initially but eventually also potatoes, beets, zucchini, tomatoes peppers and more.

In collaboration with the MIT Media Lab and IDEO, the company’s Food + Future CoLab will be testing their indoor production technology in stores around the country starting next spring. Target aims to leverage its scale to optimize their approach over time while also using their strategy to attract conscientious consumers.

Among other advantages, local and in-store aquaponic setups require less water and no pesticides as compared to outdoor alternatives. Also, since stores are already temperature-controlled for food storage and customer consideration, heating and cooling are effectively taken care of without additional energy expenditures.

Neither vertical farming nor close-to-source produce are new. Huge vertical farms have enjoyed success from Japan to New Jersey and rooftop farms often provide food for local communities or restaurants and hotels below. Still, like a similar project in Germany, this takes the idea to the next level, offering fresh organic crops alongside conventional ones right in a retail grocery shopping outlet. As populations continue to urbanize, demand for city-grown food (without the transportation costs and with appeal to local-oriented eaters) will only continue to grow.