Urban agriculture has the potential to make a valuable contribution to sustainability. It can reduce transportation routes and make material cycles more economical and efficient. It also makes agricultural production more tangible for city dwellers. A new Rewe supermarket in Wiesbaden demonstrates that urban agriculture can be integrated into existing structures and implemented with architectural quality.
The supermarket, designed by ACME Architekten, consists of two floors. The first floor houses the store with a generous sales area and a fish farm where perch are bred in aquaculture. Basil is grown in the rooftop greenhouse above. This combination of fish farming and plant cultivation is known as aquaponics. The fish fertilize the basil plants with their excrement. These in turn clean the water from the fish tanks, which can then flow back to the perch. The use of this recirculation system enables food production that uses 90% less water compared to conventional agriculture because the water is used twice. Around 20,000 perch are to be bred in the fish farm each year, as well as 800,000 pots of basil in the rooftop greenhouse. The basil is used to supply 480 other supermarkets in the surrounding area. While the first floor is dominated by wood in a modular design, the roof farm was built as a hot-dip galvanized steel structure, typical of greenhouses. The wooden supporting structure of the first floor and the hot-dip galvanized roof greenhouse can be easily dismantled and reused.
