From the early 2000s, the first ideas of urban agricultural production integrated within the architecture took shape as a response to the needs arising from the future urban growth and climate change. Thanks to new technology ( as LED and hydroponics), indoor urban agriculture became a “light manufacturing” by fitting in the already present productive and commercial urban fabric and by taking advantage of its location and the proximity to the user.
This research illustrates, starting from the first futuristic concepts to the realization of urban farms – called “Zero Acreage Farms” or Z-Farms-, the evolution of the architectures for urban agriculture and how they have interacted with the complexity of the urban reality, economic feasibility, and environmental sustainability. As a result, the thesis defines possible guidelines for productive hybrid architecture, proposing a designing toolbox that has derived from the analysis and evaluations made on different case studies, located between North America and Europe.
