Fertilecity

Sostenibilidad agrourbana mediante invernaderos en cubierta.
Ecoinnovación en flujos residuales de energía, agua y CO2 para la producción de alimentos.

The world's cities are responsible for 80% of global energy consumption, generating more than 70% of total waste and contributing more than 60% of the planet’s greenhouse gas emissions. Within cities, the household sector consumes the highest amount of energy and is one of the main sources of emissions. Food production is related to resources such as energy (especially for transport), and water, given that irrigation consumes about 80% of groundwater in Southern Europe.

The coordinated project FertileCity evaluates an eco-innovative concept for improving the sustainability of buildings in urban environments and producing high quality vegetables, by means of interconnecting and integrating greenhouses in buildings to produce food. The global objective is to analyze from the technological and sustainability points of view a new system for horticulture production for Mediterranean urban systems through the integration of greenhouses in the rooftops. The development of the study will consist on the integration of multidisciplinary tools that encompasses life cycle assessment (LCA, LCC), energy (simulation) and sustainability (MIVES) as well as methods for evaluating the agronomic performance and the viability of implementing these systems in urban planning.

A key feature of the project is the interdisciplinary point of view: architectural aspects (material resources, integration of production in a building, sustainable planning), energy (efficiency and residual heat exchange between systems), water (rainwater harvesting, reuse and efficiency), emissions (CO2 utilization and mitigation), sustainability (quantification of its pillars to justify the goodness of the proposed solutions) and agricultural (food quality).

The team is composed by researchers from the group Sostenipra, that belongs to the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), with expertise on the areas of environmental impact accounting, urban water cycle, flows characterization and economic assessment, and from the Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC), with experience on fields of energy assessment, energy efficiency, architecture and sustainability assessment. The project also considers the external advice from researchers of IRTA, experts on agronomy and greenhouse technologies.