Rooftop agriculture and public space design challenge.
Spectra’s rooftops are one of the three layers of public space in the city alongside the street and L2 system. Block residents can determine how much they want to open their rooftop space to their neighbors. One block might open a shared space for block residents, while another could decide to run a public cafe and connect their rooftop to neighboring blocks with pedestrian bridges.
Urban Agriculture
Another challenge of the rooftops was to create a replicable solution for urban agriculture that could be deployed according to the needs of each block. Since some blocks may choose not to incorporate agriculture into their shared courtyard space, it was important for us to reserve space for this on the rooftops.
Nutrition Strategies
To respond to the challenge of supplemental nutrition for 500 block residents, we had to research what could be realistically grown on the rooftops without increasing the structural load of the building. It turns out there’s quite a lot that can be grown in shallow soil. Our rooftop concept shows one way to use solar energy that would be soaked up in order to grow crops. Two of the most interesting strategies we researched and modeled were vertical planting and intercropping, where one species of plant that needs more sunlight shades another that is more sensitive.
