Hungry EcoCities

Hungry EcoCities is a three and a half year research program developed within the European Commission’s STARTS (Science, Technology and the Arts) initiative. It brought together a multidisciplinary team from science, technology, and the arts with three creative studios – CRA, SOS and EatThis – each defining its own line of inquiry into the future of food systems.

CRA’s direction, ‘City+Farming Synergies,’ focused on a long-standing gap: architecture has rarely shaped the systems through which food is produced and distributed. Over time, agriculture moved beyond the city’s physical and perceptual boundaries. Food infrastructures became industrial and remote, and design disciplines stepped away from their spatial implications.

Demographic forecasts suggest that roughly 2.5 billion additional people may join the global dinner table by 2050. Much of the debate about feeding that population centers on efficiency and yield. CRA’s vision accepted the importance of productivity but questioned whether output alone can define the urban condition. Food systems are spatial arrangements. They shape buildings, supply chains, and patterns of daily life.

CRA has been involved since the proposal stage with other consortium partners. During the project CRA is responsible for setting up the residency framework and overseeing project development as one of the creative mentors. Within Hungry EcoCities, CRA launched an open call aligned with this position. Our ambition in the project was  the integration of cultivation within buildings, the redesign of food retail and supply infrastructure, and the use of innovative farming as a tool in urban planning.

The residency program operated through two formats. Humanizing Technology Experiments supported individual artists. Paths to Progress Experiments paired artists with small and medium-sized enterprises, allowing ideas to be tested within commercial contexts. Projects advanced through prototypes and site-based trials.

One research track examined how controlled-environment agriculture and sensing technologies might influence building form. The farmscraper served as a working hypothesis — a vertical structure where cultivation is embedded within façade and interior. Another line of work addressed distribution systems, considering how markets and supermarkets might be reconfigured through proximity to production. A separate strand considered how food production could be introduced into planning frameworks as a spatial variable rather than an afterthought.

CRA structured and mentored its residency stream, setting the research framework and guiding teams through development and fabrication. The studio provided architectural input to assess feasibility and environmental performance within existing urban conditions.

In contributing to Hungry EcoCities, CRA drew on experience from earlier projects that examined food as part of urban infrastructure, including the Future Food District for Coop at Expo Milano 2015 and the integration of cultivation within CapitaSpring in Singapore.