This suburban retrofit turns a common element that is quickly becoming a liability for Florida communities, golf courses, into an amenity that contributes to sustainability and quality of life. Golf courses are expensive and resource intensive to maintain and decreasing in popularity. In their place, agricultural cultivation can provide fresh produce, local employment, community engagement and beautiful landscapes.
Golf greens are converted to agriculture and aquaculture with cyclical production repurposing waste from one product to fertilizer for the next. The cycle reaches into residential neighborhoods via street tree orchards, edible landscapes and a vertical hydroponic walls with produce collected by the homeowners association. The wall and new “granny flats” create a more urban streetscape suited to a sustainable multimodal lifestyle that includes walking short distances to the market and bicycling for transportation and recreation.
As suburbia meets major transportation corridors, defunct strip malls and big boxes are refurbished to provide places to prepare and sell wholesome meals made with local food. Cooperative commercial kitchens are essential to enable the safe, legal production of prepared foods by small local vendors. The big box store converted to a community market provides a place to store and sell goods for the community farm as well as other local farmers and craftspeople in the shade and sheltered from the frequent Florida rains and storms.
Florida is an environment where agriculture should be a part of every neighborhood year round, yet the winter weather drove the real estate to typify it as a retirement retreat instead.
I hope this catches on. I can imagine picking fruit from the walls and walking door to door to sell it as I go… then taking the rest to a farmers market on the weekend.
I think incorporating farms within the urban/suburban landscape is an essential concept missing from our car driven society.
Claudia, Hija
Excelente trabajo, con vision a futuro y especialmente para que las mismas comunidades generen sus propios productos de primera necesidad de forma de autoabastecerse a futuro, mejoren el clima por la vegetacion y tengo un paisajismo natural que enriquece su calidad de vida.
Te felicito y me siento muy orgullosa de Ti.
Te quiero mucho.
Papa