Books by Gundula Proksch
Creating Urban Agriculture Systems offers background, expertise, and inspiration for designing wi... more Creating Urban Agriculture Systems offers background, expertise, and inspiration for designing with urban agriculture. It shows how to grow food in buildings and cities, operate growing systems, and integrate them with natural cycles and existing infrastructures. It teaches the essential environmental inputs and operational strategies of urban farms and inspires community and design strategies for innovative operations and sustainable urban environments that produce fresh, local food. Over 70 projects and sixteen in-depth case studies of productive, integrated systems, located in North America, Europe, and Asia are organized by their emphasis on nutrient, water, and energy management, farm operation, community integration, and design approaches to document innovative strategies in action. Interviews with leading architecture firms including WORKac, Kiss + Cathcart, Weber Thompson, CJ Lim/Studio 8, and SOA Architects highlight the challenges and rewards connected to creating urban agriculture systems. Catalogs of growing and building systems, a glossary, bibliography, and abstracts are complimentary information included in the book.
Papers by Gundula Proksch
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By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities and consume 80% of the global f... more By 2050, two-thirds of the world’s population will live in cities and consume 80% of the global food supply. As the changing climate exacerbates pressure on all sectors of the economy, new frameworks for resource management in urban areas have been introduced. The food-water-energy nexus and the circular economy are two prominent examples; these conceptual frameworks recognize that resources consumed by cities are finite and intricately interdependent. In alignment with these ideas, professionals in the built environments shoulder a significant responsibility to design future buildings, neighborhoods, and cities that can sustain themselves while exerting minimal impact on the surrounding environment. The supply and consumption of food, water, and energy in future cities have, therefore become an architectural problem - and an opportunity for designers to contribute to a more significant societal shift.
Carbon
Energy use within buildings contributes to nearly a third of carbon emissions in the United State... more Energy use within buildings contributes to nearly a third of carbon emissions in the United States (Zhang et al. 2019, EPA). Meanwhile, between 30-40% of food in the U.S. is wasted and generates carbon emissions equivalent to that of 37 million cars yearly (UN FAO). Long term decarbonization strategies within the built environment can look to alternative energy mechanisms which redirect waste resources as inputs to other systems. Circular City models of sustainability accordingly look for potentials to close loops, turning waste into resources and reducing pollution. These approaches are generating increasing interest and seek to advance a very applied approach to sustainability- one which will integrally require leadership from design fields, local governments, and community leadership to succeed.
Expanding the View
The current pandemic, with its associated need for physical distancing and the accompanying trans... more The current pandemic, with its associated need for physical distancing and the accompanying transformation of the built environment, generates the pressing need for built environment researchers to refocus their research and respond to the current public health crisis. An interdisciplinary team from the College of Built Environments at the University of Washington (UW) with backgrounds in economics, urban planning, and architecture raised the following question: How do the physical design and service models of essential services and businesses improve or worsen the prospect of business continuity, economic success, and social welfare in the COVID-19 pandemic?
Carbon
This research collaboration between the Circular City + Living Systems (CCLS) r esearch lab and t... more This research collaboration between the Circular City + Living Systems (CCLS) r esearch lab and t he architecture practice Weber Thompson addresses the intersection of three critical topics affecting the carbon footprint of the built environment: adaptive reuse of existing buildings, increased availability of electric and autonomous vehicles, and food production in cities. This study measures and compares the relative impact of the operational carbon impact reduction of an eventual transition to electric autonomous vehicles, the embodied carbon reduction of adaptive building reuse, and the potential to sequester carbon as a benefit from living systems in urban aquaponics operations in adapted parking garages.
Frontiers in Built Environment, 2022
Growing in popularity, the circular city framework is at the leading-edge of a larger and older t... more Growing in popularity, the circular city framework is at the leading-edge of a larger and older transitional dialogue which envisions regenerative, circular, and symbiotic systems as the future of urban sustainability. The need for more research supporting the implementation of such concepts has been often noted in literature. To help address this gap, this holistic review assesses a range of pertinent sustainability frameworks as a platform to identify actionable strategies which can be leveraged to support and implement circular city goals. This assessment is grounded in a holistic overview of related frameworks across interdisciplinary and scalar domains including circular city, the food-water-energy nexus, circular economy, bioeconomy, industrial symbiosis, regenerative design, and others. Building on these interrelationships, the applied strategies espoused within these publications are synthesized and assessed in the context of circular city implementation. From an initial 250...
ArXiv, 2017
The University of Washington eScience Institute runs an annual Data Science for Social Good (DSSG... more The University of Washington eScience Institute runs an annual Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) program that selects four projects each year to train students from a wide range of disciplines while helping community members execute social good projects, often with an urban focus. We present observations and deliberations of one such project, the DSSG 2017 'Equitable Futures' project, which investigates the ongoing gentrification process and the increasingly inequitable access to opportunities in Seattle. Similar processes can be observed in many major cities. The project connects issues usually analyzed in the disciplines of the built environment, geography, sociology, economics, social work and city governments with data science methodologies and visualizations.
Rooftops in our urban centers represent a vast potential of currently underused space. The transf... more Rooftops in our urban centers represent a vast potential of currently underused space. The transformation of these urban rooftops into an environmental, ecological resource through an increased implementation of green roof technology is becoming standard practice in many cities throughout the world. Due to the rapidly growing interest in urban agriculture, a new form of green roofs - rooftop farms - are emerging. This study compares the environmental, economic and social benefits of conventional and productive green roofs. The intent of this paper is to outline realizable benefits and establish methods for optimizing rooftop occupation in the urban environment. The basis for this paper’s argument is derived from data collected from a number of rooftop farming case studies located throughout North America, which highlight the differences between conventional green roofs and productive green roofs. Points of comparison fall into three groups: potential environmental, economical and so...
As the building sector faces global challenges that affect urban supplies of food, water and ener... more As the building sector faces global challenges that affect urban supplies of food, water and energy, multifaceted sustainability solutions need to be re-examined through the lens of built environments. Aquaponics, a strategy that combines recirculating aquaculture with hydroponics to optimize fish and plant production, has been recognized as one of "ten technologies which could change our lives" by merit of its potential to revolutionize how we feed urban populations. To holistically assess the environmental performance of urban aquaponic farms, impacts generated by aquaponic systems must be combined with impacts generated by host envelopes. This paper outlines the opportunities and challenges of using life cycle assessment (LCA) to evaluate and design urban aquaponic farms. The methodology described here is part of a larger study of urban integration of aquaponics conducted by the interdisciplinary research consortium CITYFOOD. First, the challenges of applying LCA in arc...
Designers are expanding the definition of Sustainable Design by incorporating biological processe... more Designers are expanding the definition of Sustainable Design by incorporating biological processes and systems directly in their projects. Systems like green roofs and living machines have proved themselves invaluable for reducing a project’s overall environmental footprint. More recently, advanced algae cultivation technologies – some still in the testing phase – inspire architects and designers. With its efficient energy production and potential for improving the health of the environment, algae cultivation is the next photosynthetically driven system primed for architectural integration. This paper examines the various methods of algae farming, their roles in cyclical systems, their design implications, and their potential for integration into urban space. Algae can effectively sequester carbon dioxide and treat wastewater while increasing its growth efficiency. These properties give it great potential for integration with other infrastructural systems. Synergies can be developed...
Aquaponics Food Production Systems, 2019
Aquaponics’ potential to transform urban food production has been documented in a rapid increase ... more Aquaponics’ potential to transform urban food production has been documented in a rapid increase of academic research and public interest in the field. To translate this publicity into real-world impact, the creation of commercial farms and their relationship to the urban environment have to be further examined. This research has to bridge the gap between existing literature on growing system performance and urban metabolic flows by considering the built form of aquaponic farms. To assess the potential for urban integration of aquaponics, existing case studies are classified by the typology of their building enclosure, with the two main categories being greenhouses and indoor environments. This classification allows for some assumptions about the farms’ performance in their context, but a more in-depth life cycle assessment (LCA) is necessary to evaluate different configurations. The LCA approach is presented as a way to inventory design criteria and respective strategies which can ...
Advances in Geosciences, 2020
Creating Urban Agricultural Systems, 2016
Journal for Education in the Built Environment, 2012
Interdisciplinary education is becoming a hallmark strategy for preparing and providing students ... more Interdisciplinary education is becoming a hallmark strategy for preparing and providing students with the skills necessary for addressing the complexity of our contemporary built environments. In this paper, we examine how the studio model of education presents opportunities for increasing interdisciplinarity in the classroom. Specifically, we develop a pedagogical framework for examining three educational themes: establishing rigorous forms of experimentation, developing collective understanding, and generating interdisciplinary collaboration. We identify that developing collective understanding is the most challenging of the three themes to frame, implement, and achieve in the classroom, suggesting interdisciplinary studio education should focus on sharing disciplinary vocabularies and improving students' communicative techniques.
106th ACSA Annual Meeting Proceedings, The Ethical Imperative, 2018
Our paper presents the products, preliminary findings, and methodology of the Equitable Futures p... more Our paper presents the products, preliminary findings, and methodology of the Equitable Futures project, an investigation into the active gentrification process and increasingly inequitable access to opportunities in Seattle. The project is currently underway at the University of Washington eScience Institute’s Data Science for Social Good (DSSG) summer program, and connects issues usually analyzed by people working in the built environment, geography, sociology, economics, social work and local governments with a heavy focus on accessibility and transparency. The project team is developing a tool that allows stakeholders in the city’s development process to analyze, model, and visualize existing trends and the impact of potential changes in the built environment. Our tool uses publicly available data to model and visualize equity indicators on the city and neighborhood scale. In this paper, we focus on the incorporation of data transparency and model interpretability strategies int...
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Books by Gundula Proksch
Papers by Gundula Proksch
Built to Grow - Blending Architecture and Biology
Edited by Barbara Imhof and Petra Gruber
Birkhäuser, Edition Angewandte, 2016
175 pages
$ 56 (e-book, paperback)