Dickson Despommier’s The Vertical Farm is both a proposal and a piece of infrastructural imagination: move food production into controlled, multi-storey urban environments, reduce dependence on arable land, and rethink the city as a place that produces rather than merely consumes.

Written by the scientist most closely associated with popularising vertical farming, the book lays out the environmental pressures behind the idea—population growth, soil exhaustion, water scarcity, agricultural runoff, deforestation and the long, fragile supply chains that now separate cities from their food.

Despommier is an energetic advocate rather than a disinterested referee. He presents hydroponics, aeroponics, closed-loop water systems and waste recovery as components of a more resilient urban ecology, moving between practical technologies and large-scale architectural speculation. Some of its numerical projections and techno-utopian confidence belong very visibly to 2010, before the limits and extraordinary energy costs of commercial vertical farming became quite so apparent. That datedness is part of the book’s interest: it captures the moment vertical agriculture moved from fringe environmental concept into the vocabulary of climate design, investment and urban planning.

An accessible and heavily illustrated introduction to one of the century’s more seductive attempts to redesign the food system—equal parts environmental argument, technical primer and skyscraper dream.

Thomas Dunne Books / St. Martin’s Press, 2010. First edition, first printing. Hardcover with dust jacket. Light edgewear and creasing to jacket, with minor rubbing; book itself clean and firmly bound.