Urban dwellers find peace in skyline farms
Rooftop gardens help improve well-being of overworked Hong Kongers
— High above downtown Hong Kong’s bustling, traffic-clogged streets, a group of office workers was toiling away not on a corporate acquisition or a public share offering but on harvesting a bumper crop of lettuce atop one of the skyscrapers studding the city’s skyline.
It’s rooftop farming taken to the extreme, and more about reaping happiness than providing food.
The volunteers were picking butter lettuce, Indian lettuce and Chinese mustard leaf in rows of low black plastic planters on a decommissioned helipad on the 146-metrehigh roof of the 38-storey Bank of America tower.
“It’s pretty dirty but still I really enjoy it,” said Catherine Ng, one of five volunteers who work for the property company managing the tower.
The farm is run by Rooftop Republic, a three-year-old startup whose founders are tapping growing interest in organic food and taking advantage of unused roof space in the cramped, high-rent Chinese city.
Hong Kong, with its skinny office blocks and apartment towers and busy, affluent residents, might seem an unlikely place for rooftop farming to catch on. The finance and trading hub has rural suburbs, but farming only takes up 700 hectares of its land and agriculture accounts for 0.1 per cent of its economic output. Rooftop Republic’s founders say the appetite for their services is growing among Hong Kongers who are seeking a more sustainable lifestyle and concerned about where their food comes from.
“We have been getting more and more interest from people who want to grow their own food,” said Michelle Hong, one of the founders.
“A lot of it is triggered by concerns about food safety and the realization that a lot of the food they consume might be laden with pesticides.”
Rooftop Republic has set up on average one farm a month since its founding and now manages 36, covering more than about 2,800 square metres, including one in mainland China, Hong said. Vegetables from the tower are donated to a food bank for uses in lunch boxes distributed to the needy.
Some of its other farms are at hotels or restaurants, which use the herbs, eggplants and melons for dishes on their menus.
Plenty of other groups or individuals have started cultivating their own rooftop vegetable gardens, said Matthew Pryor, a Hong Kong University architecture professor who has counted at least 60.
Pryor’s research found approximately 1,500 rooftop farmers in the city, cultivating a total area of about 11/2 hectares. He thinks there’s potential for that to easily grow to 50,000 people working on a suitable rooftop area of 600 hectares.
But Pryor said he discovered through his research that their main product isn’t edible.
“The rooftop farms here produce virtually nothing” compared to Hong Kong’s overall consumption, Pryor said. “What they do produce, however, is happiness, and this social capital that they generate is enormous.”
The farms can help stressed-out, overworked and socially isolated Hong Kongers be happier and improve their well-being by letting them hang out with their friends and commune with nature.