Cultivating Tehran

Tehran benefits from fertile land and climate conditions proper for agriculture, which is quite rare in the hot and arid context of Iran. On the other hand, the growing city has erased most of the lands and gardens throughout the past decades. Besides the overpopulation has led to higher demand for the production of food, specifically herbs. 

As proposed by “Cultivating Tehran”, through the deployment of a three-layered urban farming system, the city can become more resilient regarding food sources. The first layer includes a chain of cultivable patches of left-over spaces across the city. The second layer functions on a trackable network of mobile and pop-up farming units serving as production and distribution hubs. These units can initiate urban farming in infertile, un-programmed and vacant urban areas. Also, as a part  of their possible function, they hold temporary housing units for farmers and distributors. Finally, in the third layer, for making the fixed and portable urban farms operate in an interconnected network involving citizens, they are virtually coordinated through an application, accompanied by a social media platform.

In the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (2017), a well-equipped pop-up farming unit of this integrated system operated as the demo of Cultivating Tehran.

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Project Manager : Shima Roshanzamir

Research & Design Team :  Sahar Barzani . Parnian Pezeshki . Avisa Yazdani . Sima Sarkar . Sina Zibakerdar