Imagine walking on the roof of your home or office building in the middle of the city, harvesting herbs, fresh vegetables and salad from your raised beds. These ingredients then land directly on your plate: regional, seasonal, sustainable. Roofs as producers of electricity, food and a good urban climate, the experts from LIFE, the Institute for Climate, Energy and Society of JOANNEUM RESEARCH, together with partners from business, science and the education sector, are working on a best-practice example for the sustainable use of roof gardens.
„Roofs in the city of the future have three important additional functions: cool city, produce food and produce electricity. The Science Tower is the first building in Austria to show a symbiosis of these three functions. To operate this sustainable food production on urban roof surfaces is the integrative solution for cities to adapt to climate change"
Franz Prettenthaler
Director, Joanneum Research - LIFE
The use of urban rooftops is on the rise worldwide and is becoming increasingly important as land resources become scarcer. The concept of producing food in the immediate vicinity of the urban population brings more popular consent to locally produced food, in addition to short transport routes and the positive effect on the microclimate in the city. In high-quality substrate crops for food production are grown to explore which components are required for sustainable, professionalized food production on rooftops.
