Vanguard Visions of Vertical Farming

Envisaging and Contesting an Emerging Food Production System

Bibliographic Data

ID5337655
AuthorsMascha Gugganig (0000-0001-8675-0168, Faculty of Biology, Ludwig-Maximilians University, Munich, Germany, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume50
Issue2
Pages387-418
Publication date2025-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueScience Technology & Human Values (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0162-2439 • E-ISSN: 1552-8251
PublisherSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/01622439241240796
OpenAlexW4393986876
LanguageEN
Citations received5
References cited65

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

Agriculture · Archaeology · Economics · Food processing · Geography · Political science · Sociology · Vanguard · Vision · Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development · Anthropology · Organic Food and Agriculture

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