Spatial Imaginaries of Vertical Farming: Where We Plant Reveals Who We Are in the Anthropocene

• In Event: Feeding the Anthropocene: The Promises of Agro-Food Tech and the Difference Of Food - II

Abstract

In “Between Space and Time: Reflections on the Geographical Imagination”, David Harvey advocated a turn into critical geography by emphasizing that “we need to know how space and time get defined by these material processes which give us our daily bread (1990, 423).” Three decades later, with never ending disruptions from promissory agri-food tech, the question about how to deconstruct the spatiality of food production is expanded into a partly futuristic enquiry. Where are we going to plant? And why do these spatial imaginaries of future production matter? Treating vertical farming as an example, this paper argues that by imagining where and how to grow food in the future, we are also planning on where and how we live, thus revealing entrepreneurial/social (sub)conscious of who we are going to be. Focusing on the founding father of vertical farming, Dickson Despommier’s The Vertical Farm and interviews, and drawing on critical theories from Marxist, feminist and psychoanalysis geographers, the paper uses discourse analysis to unmask the technology’s underpinning idealistic yet troublesome imagination of a precious but dangerous rural space, as well as a controllable and anthropocentric urban place. It also scrutinizes subsequent counter-opinions like Stan Cox’s “Why Growing Vegetables in High-Rises Is Wrong on So Many Levels”, together with Despommier’s supporters’ rebuttals, in order to complicate this urban/rural dualism and situate real eaters and entrepreneurs in the landscape. In so doing, this paper pushes people to reflect upon the power of promissory technological narratives and how it can shape people’s identification.

Author

• Ke Hu, Virginia Tech