While still in planning stages, this exciting new urban farm community is more than just some ambition concept. The incredibly beautiful Hyperions garden towers will be built in Jaypee Sports City near Delhi and completed by 2020. It’s a residential development that features all kinds of ecological attributes and was designed with full sustainability in mind. Instead of the token little vegetable growing space tucked in somewhere, it’s largely agricultural – the grounds, vertical and rooftop gardens… organic, locavore, and green thumb nirvana in the heart of India’s first planned community. A high-rise agrihood surrounded by sports and active entertainment of every flavor.
Completion by 2020 might seem like it’s going to take far too long to bring this from paper to reality, but that’s only 4 years from now, and there’s an incredible amount of stuff going on here. It’s far more than slapping up some buildings that will hold trees and flowering plants on the sides from top to bottom, or sacrificing a little real estate space to organic vegetable production for the residents. Project planning began in early 2014 as a collaboration between a local developer in Jaypee, an agro ecologist from India, and agroarchitectural firm, Vincent Callebaut. The six 35-story buildings are designed to take full advantage of the sun for vertical orchards, and have a bioclimatic greenhouse on their roofs. Through photovoltaics, wind, and geothermal technology, the closed loop buildings and growing systems will be completely self-sustaining – and create surplus energy! The land plan includes permaculture, organic fruit and vegetable crops, rainwater harvesting, greywater recycling, aquaponics, egg production, and more.
The vision incorporates urban agriculture business incubation, an on-site grocery store stocked with farm-to-fork fresh foods grown year-around, and local sustainable materials use. The residential units all have access to personal farming space, allowing the entire community to grow their own, or grow for retail to area consumers. All totally awesome, but unlike so many of these new developments, the underlying reasons behind it are completely different than anything similar in the works, or already existing. Many of them, like the new ‘agrihoods’ in the United States, or the community complexes being developed by health corporations, aren’t addressing the entire problem the world faces holistically. They may say so, but like modern medicine, those cure only the part of the issue that will profit them the most. Hyperions is holistic, has nothing to do with health care providers or insurance companies, or trying to peddle new houses to a fresh demographic.
They seek to do away with the damage and injustices of the so-called ‘Green Revolution’ of industrial farming that has wreaked havoc on the soil, water, food diversity, people’s health, and farm communities in India. If you’re going to erect the model that the rest of the world could use to turn things around, it’s not going to happen overnight. It’s also not going to be about fast money, cheap housing, or industrial anything. In fact, every part of the construction and it’s material needs to lighten man’s footprint on the environment, himself, and the natural world. And rather than trying to summarize the message, which will lose much of its inspiring qualities and brilliance of the Agroecological Revolution taking place…
“We the ‘Urban Farmers’ claim that converting worldwide agriculture into organic techniques and bio-sourced construction could reduce worldwide CO2 emissions by about 40% by 2030. Hyperions is a sustainable agroecosystem project capable of resisting climate change thanks to its healthy economic and environmental ecosystems. Solidarity, fairness, and the right symbiosis of human actions on nature: those are our founding ethical values.”
Read the whole story – after you’re done drooling over the pictures, that is. It’s below the gallery when you land: Stop the Ecocide.