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Sasaki

Shanghai is building a massive agricultural district with a vertical farm

The farms will primarily grow leafy greens, like kale, bok choi, and spinach.

CHINESE CITY SHANGHAI is known for towering buildings, but now it wants towering farms.

The city is building a 250-acre agricultural district, which will function as a space to work, live, shop, and farm food. Called Sunqiao Shanghai, it will include new public plazas, parks, housing, stores, restaurants, greenhouses, and a science museum.

The masterplan was conceived by the design firm Sasaki and is part of a larger plan to turn a portion of the city into an ag-tech hub, Michael Grove, a principal at Sasaki, told Business Insider.

In the mid-1990s, Shanghai’s government designated a 3.6-square-mile area of the city for agricultural production, hoping that bioengineering and biopharmaceutical companies would set up research facilities working in tandem with city greenhouses.

Shanghai only constructed 3 single-storey greenhouses at the time. Sasaki was commissioned to expand the plan for Sunqiao, Grove says. There isn’t a construction timeline yet, but Grove estimates that a crew will break ground on the project by 2018.

PastedImage-80709 Sasaki Sasaki

The farms will primarily grow leafy greens, like kale, bok choi, and spinach. Those will be sold to restaurants, grocers, or exported. In the future, Grove says the district may also raise fish in vertical aquaponic farms.

While cutting down on carbon footprints, the farms will have large energy demands, using LED lights to grow the food.

Read: This 40-storey skyscraper has trees climbing all the way to the top

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    Mute Just Me
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    May 6th 2017, 6:07 PM

    Years ago the west laughed at China, considering them as backward peasants. Today the tide has turned and China is a great nation, a strong economy and a world leader in innovation .

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    Mute Hatchjaw
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    May 7th 2017, 12:07 AM

    @Just Me: More like a world leader in intellectual property theft.

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    Mute Mick Tobin
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    May 6th 2017, 5:21 PM

    This should be the answer to deforestation. Shame it’ll be so much easier to burn or chop down acres of rain forest for decades to come. I suggest the Brazilians go take a peek in Shanghai soon.

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    Mute Johnny Maloney
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    May 6th 2017, 6:11 PM

    By some distance, the most impressive city in the world…

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    Mute Brian
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    May 6th 2017, 6:21 PM

    @Johnny Maloney: your joking right? Overpopulated and over polluted in mind boggaling extreme it’s mass of humanity that every city should strive to avoid .Technological feats aside as i couldn’t stand the place.

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    Mute Johnny Maloney
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    May 6th 2017, 8:35 PM

    @Brian: trying to decipher your spelling/grammar gave me a headache.

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    Mute John O'Driscoll
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    May 6th 2017, 9:05 PM

    @Johnny Maloney: from twenty foot away. That’s what we used say. When you get closer you can see all the holes. I’m sure it’s changed much in ten years and more since saw her last. Wo ai Sharnghai.

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    Mute Stephen
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    May 6th 2017, 5:46 PM

    Is this an excuse for the city smog, have all the plants under glass? Why not parks and cut air pollution.

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    Mute Dáithí Ó Raghallaigh
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    May 6th 2017, 5:03 PM

    You sure that not a marajua grow house?

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    Mute John O'Driscoll
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    May 6th 2017, 9:03 PM

    And they’ll do it an all. In about three months. No probs with planning objectors there. Nor unions nor that. Anyway it’ll all be fertilized from the privies of Shanghai which is pretty neat recycling but the prawn farms on the aptly named Huang Pu river you can take a trip from the Bund downriver past miles of rusting warehouses and there they all are with a massive shit pipe pouring the city’s effluent out on top of the cages quite put me off but then I realized prawns are shit-filters that’s what they do and then thought it quite green though not as green as my face. The most unfortunate job I’ve ever seen bestowed on a man was the job of the poor fella on the shit collecting tricycle. More dawn walks I had would see him and his fellows in their blue uniforms cycling these ancient three wheeled High Nellys with two 45 gallon drums up on the back filled to the brim from the output of 23 million ars es you could smell him before you saw him and it was all on route to the vegetable farms of Pudong there to be sprayed on the veggies which grew huge and ripe but you had to wash them with special stuff to get rid of a type of human fluke that can do murder on your liver. Anyway hope this works out for them. Zhù nǐ hǎo yùn

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