Ecological Laboratory for Urban Agriculture

Landscape architecture inherited an assumption that the environment is a closed system: measurable, predictable, and ultimately controllable. ELUA builds machines that adapt instead. Two gantry robots — one indoors, one on a sixth-floor rooftop — seed, water, weed, and prune two polyculture gardens as imperfect agents in a system that keeps changing. The outcome is a robotic ecology: an urban agricultural system supported, mediated, and co-evolved by machines and people, where design is a long-term engagement rather than a finished construction.

The gardens sit on the City College campus, at the Solar RoofPod and the Harlem Garden for Urban Food, supported by sensor arrays, an AI-powered camera, and the network infrastructure that makes responsive landscape research possible. Rather than maximizing yield, the work asks whether machine-assisted cultivation can hold in a polyculture that changes season to season — a question about urban food security, biodiversity, and climate adaptation that a controlled system cannot answer.

The project also built collaborations with community partners and local high schools, developing STEM curriculum and outreach with the next generation of scientists and urban farmers.

This project was partly funded by a 2022 CUNY Interdisciplinary Research Grant, a CCNY College-wide Research Vision Award, and a 2023 PSC-CUNY Award.