Vanguard Visions of Vertical Farming: Envisaging and Contesting an Emerging Food Production System
Mascha Gugganig
Abstract
Vertical farming is an emerging urban food growth proposal that has gained considerable attention for its ability to be space-efficient, independent of outside weather conditions, and to address a dismal agricultural system and ecoclimatic crises. VF is also a field riddled with debates on the unsustainability and high (energy) costs of a highly automated, indoor growth system that produces only a small range of perishable food. This paper explores arguments, visions, and internal disagreements among scientists, engineers, consultants, and entrepreneurs who form a heterogeneous, elite group of sociotechnical vanguards that popularize not yet widely accepted vanguard visions of future urban food production. It demonstrates that for the dominant vertical farm vanguard vision, a majority of vanguards borrow popular concepts and imaginaries from other sectors: containment of plant growth, cleanliness, the capability to feed the world, and the land-sparing narrative. The findings suggest three dimensions that add to the theorization of vanguard visions: the central role of mobilized problem-scripts; internal disagreements that indicate the contingency of vanguard visions and the existence of fringe visions; and that disagreements can reveal caveat politics, where a technical system, like VF, is not seen as the solution, but one of many.