Vancouver is expanding its local food system, sparking innovations in urban agriculture

Since 2018, Vancouver has required developers to incorporate sustainable strategies like public transit, water management, and affordable housing into their rezoning applications for large development projects. The city also mandates expanded access to healthy, locally grown food by providing three diverse on-site “food assets,” such as rooftop gardens, edible landscaping, food processing facilities, and community markets.

“The city is responding to the fact that we’re extremely reliant on agricultural imports,” says Alycia van der Gracht, co-founder of QuantoTech Solutions, a company that designs, manufactures, and operates vertical farms around the metro area. “Our population is growing, and we have to get creative about how we produce food. A big part of that is integrating with buildings.”

Bosa Properties, one of Vancouver’s largest end-to-end real estate companies, embraced innovation as part of its rezoning application for a proposed high-rise residential tower, Barclay x Thurlow. To meet the city’s food sustainability requirements, the team dedicated space for a community garden and committed to supporting a local mobile food market. But fulfilling the city’s requirement for a third food asset proved challenging. “We just didn’t have the space,” says Bruce Currie, senior development manager at Bosa Properties. “After some collaboration with the city, they suggested we consider an indoor vertical farm in the parkade—an innovative concept—and introduced us to QuantoTech.”

The concept involved designing a special room in an unused corner of the underground parking structure and fitting it up with shelving and lights to grow lettuce and other greens indoors. Staffing and seedlings for the vertical farm would be supplied by QuantoTech. “We have a decentralized ‘hub and spoke’ farming model,” says van der Gracht, explaining that space- and labor-intensive seeding, propagation, and equipment cleaning operations occur at “hubs” on the city’s outskirts. “The final growing stage happens at the ‘spoke’ farms in the cities, when the plants are starting to take up a lot more space. Our teams tend them, harvest them, and stock them in self-serve kiosks at the site.”

In addition to working out the supply side details and fine-tuning further operational and legal details with the city, the team also wanted to consider potential demand. To gauge residents’ interest in purchasing hyper-local produce, Bosa Properties piloted a program in one of its existing rental buildings, stocking refrigerated vending machines in the building lobby with fresh greens from a nearby farm. The response was overwhelmingly positive. “We thought we had a week’s supply, but it sold out within two days,” says Ayden Kristmanson, former sustainability specialist at Bosa Properties. “It quickly proved to us that our tenants truly valued this. We actually had to regroup and figure out how to keep up.”

Barclay x Thurlow is currently in the design phase, with an estimated completion in 2030. In the meantime, Bosa is focused on understanding the evolving needs of residents. “Our world is changing quickly, and our amenity offerings need to evolve with it,” Kristmanson says. “We’re seeing a growing interest in food security and access to fresh, local produce, and we’re designing with that in mind.”

The experience has been eye-opening, says Currie. “In our day-to-day work as developers, food systems aren’t usually front and center. Vancouver is leading the way, and what began as a requirement became something more meaningful. Once we understood the value it could bring to the daily lives of residents, it’s something we’d consider continuing to do, even if it’s not a requirement.”

The Barclay x Thurlow project is just one example of how a concept called Building Integrated Agriculture, or BIA, can help improve food security and the circular economy by integrating food production, waste recovery, renewable energy, and water reuse into the built environment.

“We have the technology to produce a lot of food in urban settings,” says Dr. Laila Benkrima, agronomist consultant at the B.C. Centre for Agritech Innovation at Simon Fraser University. “We can use underutilized spaces on roofs, the sides of buildings, and parking areas, for example. We can use hydroponic systems (growing plants in water), vertical farms, and aquaponic systems (raising fish and growing plants). Automation and other tech can help, too.”

Benkrima is part of a team of academic researchers and designers who are collaborating to develop BIA design frameworks and policy recommendations to help bring agriculture closer to home in Vancouver and in cities all over the world. The goal is to create modules that could transform parts of individual buildings, city blocks, or even entire neighborhoods into productive urban farms that enhance food security, reduce waste and carbon emissions, and build social connections.

The team is researching policies in cities like Paris and Singapore that encourage urban farming and build social bonds through programming and education. They’re also investigating best practices and developing modular designs that could form the basis of building-integrated farms and waste-to-resource systems. Each assembly would contain components like lighting, irrigation, climate control, and waste management. The assemblies could be installed on building façades, in corridors, on ceilings, and on roofs.

The project has received funding from the Canadian government and the Agricultural Clean Technology (ACT) Program Research and Innovation Stream. In addition, the University of British Columbia, the City of Vancouver, and local urban farming experts have committed to in-kind contributions.

After refining the various assemblies’ designs, the team plans to construct a prototype to demonstrate market viability. They’re hoping the project will inspire developers, designers, farmers, and city officials to create systems that will not only be environmentally sustainable but also become integrated into the social fabric. “It’s important to train people, spread knowledge, and get everyone involved in their own food supply,” Benkrima says. “A big part of urban farming is building community.”