Greenbox : home growing food as a transition to new food systems

A stable food supply has been and still is one of the most valuable resources for any human society and essential to its success. Mastering agriculture allowed for groups of people to settle and develop societies and as populations settled and grew food systems evolved becoming more complex, ultimately providing people in most locations access to many types of food year-round. With the current population at almost 8 billion people food demand has tripled in the past 50 years (Hinnou et al.,2022) both because the population doubling and the increment in the per-capita demand. The global population is expected to grow around 10 billion by 2050 and food demand is expected to increase between 60% and 70% (Van Dijk & Luise Rauet al.,2021) so food production would need to be drastically increased. According to the World Bank and the United Nations this scenario means that there simply will not be enough food to feed the world population. In this scenario food shortages will become an issue especially on large urban areas where around 70% of the world population will live in (United Nations, “68% of the world population projected to live in urban areas by 2050, says UN”). The challenge of maintaining a stable supply chain in these circumstances and with the current volumes goes beyond a single solution, rather it depends on systematic changes in how we approach food production and consumption. In order to secure food supply in the long-term new systems need to be envisioned that consider the decentralization of food production and that also support and push people into developing habits like consuming locally grown produce and decreasing the consumption of animal-based foods. My research territory is urban food systems and the possibility of envisioning new and more resilient systems that can increase food security through the support of regional resilience, self-sufficiency and the participation of people as not just consumers. The objective with this thesis project, GreenUp is to design a concept that could seed the idea of growing food today to augment our daily diets in the future, with the long-term goal of developing resilient habits that will lead to food systems that are decentralized, stable and more democratic, all this achieved in the context of urban settings, were space is limited and growing indoors will be necessary to augment the production.