Ecological Laboratory for Urban Agriculture

A lecture on ELUA, an interdisciplinary lab that designs, tests, and evaluates models for community-based, robot-assisted urban rooftop agriculture. The Solar RoofPod and the Harlem Garden for Urban Food at City College serve as pilot laboratories for collaboration among architectural and landscape design, artificial intelligence, robotics, and urban ecology.

The talk opens with the problem the lab was built to answer. The pandemic and the supply-chain breakdown that followed exposed how heavily US cities depend on large farm operations and long-distance distribution, and how quickly that dependence becomes food insecurity. From there it walks through the lab itself: a rooftop garden expanded with a FarmBot, a sequence of experimental plantings, the harvests, and the students who learn to code by watching a robot negotiate a living system.

It closes on the research question the garden makes possible—if the garden is treated as a game, can an AI agent work out the best strategy to grow food? The conceptual stake throughout is a framework that posits intelligent machines as an integral part of society, urban ecosystems, and biophysical environments, rather than as instruments applied to them.