Urban greenhouse infrastructure Planning the Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Area

Abstract

The global urban population is rising and will continue until at least 2050. This increases urban food demand simultaneously. Conventional agricultural practices have a significant environmental footprint, and climate change negatively affects its production. As a result, urban forms of controlled environment agriculture (CEA) are on the rise to combat the demand by optimizing product output and quality. Additionally, urban CEA has the potential to improve food security and increase sustainable food production around metropolitan areas. However, the practices of urban CEA that mainly focused on leafy greens have been the only successors. Or not? What about the large-scale greenhouses in the Rotterdam-The Hague Metropolitan Area (MRDH)? These have been commercially operational for the past decade. Urbanisation and their built-up look caused the greenhouses to become part of the urban area. A recently identified research gap indicates that limited urban studies have looked into integrating CEA into the urban context, specifically on the relationship between urban CEA and urban infrastructure systems. This paper focusses on examining the infrastructure systems inside and connected to the urban greenhouses in the MRDH. Answering the question: How can urban greenhouse infrastructure be integrated into existing urban infrastructure in a sustainable way? To answer this question, the paper takes a qualitative approach and analyses these findings according to the planning theory regarding sustainable metropolitan development. Data is gathered through a literature review, field visits, and semi-structured interviews with entrepreneurs of urban greenhouses and governmental representatives of planning bodies. The findings indicate that the infrastructural requirements of the urban greenhouses are mostly similar to CEA’s requirements known in the literature. However, two specific networks for CO2 and geothermal energy are found to be crucial for urban greenhouses, and the challenges with infrastructural development are location-bound. The most challenging is … This paper argues that for urban greenhouses to contribute to sustainable metropolitan development, a more integral and collaborative planning approach on a regional scale is necessary to overcome the transmunicipal challenges.