In an insightful text, architect and curator Azza Aboulam moves from personal narrative through comparative case studies, to situated propositions in the United Arab Emirates, making a substantial and critical argument for emergent and sympathetic forms of urban agriculture. This essay was excerpted from "Pressure Cooker Recipes: An Architectural Cookbook" (Kaph Books x National Pavilion UAE, 2025), edited by Azza Aboualam, on the occasion of the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia in 2025.
Introduction
My grandmother’s chickens were so important to her. So important, in fact, that when my family would travel abroad for the summer, she called daily (internationally, back when landlines were the only link) to check in on them. She never bought eggs from the supermarket and what came out of her backyard was sufficient for a family of seven at the time.
Scales of participation in food security and sufficiency are largely varied. If I plant mint on my balcony, I am contributing to food security at the scale of a room. If I grow one kilo of cucumbers in my backyard, I am doing it at the scale of a household. If I have a farm with fruit trees and a chicken coop, sharing crops and eggs with my neighbours, I am doing it at the scale of the neighbourhood.
Agriculture — and its association with other food production practices — is a much-celebrated part of the local food movement and is ingrained in the daily practices of many individuals in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). However, its impact on reducing food insecurity in Emirati cities remains understudied, given its informal nature and small-scale output. I am not sure that growing broccoli or the occasional palm dates in one’s backyard can affect food security at the scale of the country. However, these small steps are worth exploring, especially as part of their integration into a larger strategy.1
Despite ongoing local efforts on an individual level, questions arise in terms of what happens when the strategy is scaled up to be integrated into a larger scheme, tapping into the existing infrastructure. While the concept of feeding neighbourhoods from within themselves presents many challenges, this essay speculates: How can neighbourhoods be planned with productivity as an inherent part of them, while retrofitting others?
Urban Sprawl and Urban Agriculture
The Middle East has one of the highest global urbanisation rates, with a direct relationship to the increasing demand for land and water.2 Cities in the UAE have undergone noticeable growth in recent years. Dubai’s population, for example, is expected to almost double by 2040. In the first three months of 2024, 25,700 people moved to the city, while Abu Dhabi and Sharjah have also reported an increase in residents in the same year.3 With a steadily growing world population, as well as within the UAE, it is expected that most of this growth will be concentrated in urban areas. Within the context of the UAE, this urban sprawl constitutes expansion into the desert, farther away from the coastline. This presents a number of challenges and assets. While urban sprawl overtook agricultural land in some emirates, the drier desert air presents a unique climate for the kit-of-parts that we have been experimenting with, as the assemblies performed better in less humid climates.
Sparking increased interest, urban agriculture has witnessed a significant growth spurt, especially when it comes to framing self-sufficiency within the urban context. While urban agriculture includes city greening and beautification, other factors include improved nutrition, enhancing local food security, community building, and economic development. Urban agriculture has been defined as “reconnecting with the community through food, jobs and economic development.”4 It is extremely heterogeneous, with a diverse landscape that evades a singular definition, scale, and means of measuring its success. It encompasses vertical and rooftop farming, urban foraging, community and residential gardens, and commercial urban farms. Here, urban agriculture is defined as the endeavor of growing food in an urban5 context, encompassing a range of activities that are related to food production, including self-production and subsistence agriculture on the scale of the neighbourhood.
"While urban agriculture includes city greening and beautification, other factors include improved nutrition, enhancing local food security, community building, and economic development."
Scales and Approaches
One of urban agriculture’s benefits is to re-engage city-dwellers with the educational and community-building side of food production. The systemisation and integration of the built environment and food production is not a novel approach. Across North America, most are launched in collaboration through lease agreements with public agencies, private landowners, or land trusts. While its impact on urban diets and income is still being studied, urban agriculture has constituted a local asset due to its potential to address multiple needs, such as supplying fresh produce, and offering opportunities for employment, education, and recreation.
"One of urban agriculture’s benefits is to re-engage city-dwellers with the educational and community-building side of food production."
In the case of Oakland, in particular, the city is considered to be a food desert not due to the lack of food, but rather because of the limited access and affordability to healthy and nutritious options. In response to high rates of food insecurity in East Oakland, for example, Freedom Farm has 28 wooden boxes that anyone can use to grow food, and can provide soil, seeds, and water. In tandem, Phat Beets Produce is an organisation that revitalises gardens in the city by emphasising the community aspect within the urban garden model. Gardens are managed collectively by community members and volunteers with specific guidelines to regulate garden activities. This includes what crops can be grown and the sharing of responsibilities for watering, weeding, and maintaining the space.6
The organopónico in Cuba presents another approach. Plots of land that were used for construction staging were converted into urban farms in the early 1990s after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The loss of imports affected the Cuban diet, which saw a 30% deficit in calories, as it lost its supply of wheat, beans, and oil almost overnight.7 In response to issues of food access, organopónicos are located in areas of high population density from surrounding high-rise buildings, placing the farms within walking distance for the majority of the population. Individuals can farm the land to make a living while producing fresh food in the center of the city. Each one has a market stall, which acts as an essential piece in the success of Cuba’s organopónico system, positively affecting the immediacy of this food transfer. Produce is sold by the people who work the garden and get to keep half of the sales revenue.8
While those Western-based case studies offer insight into the overlap of the urban fabric and agrarian practices, contemporary projects in the UAE provide an alternative take. Food Tech Valley is a UAE-based initiative aimed at rethinking the overlap of food production, consumption, and innovation. In addition to designated residential areas with single-family homes, the development is divided into four main “productive” zones, which is referred to as its “ecosystem.” Those include: a food production zone with advanced farming techniques, a logistics zone for processing and distribution, a business park for food and agritech operations, and an innovation and an R&D (research and development) center for developing technological solutions in agriculture. The project has partnered with Badia Farms, the Middle East's first high-tech indoor vertical farm, to integrate advanced models using hybrid farms that employ sustainable practices, reducing water usage by 90% and utilising clean energy, to grow pesticide-free, high-quality produce year-round.9 It also partnered with Tadeling, a local e-commerce platform, to distribute and sell the produce in the UAE. The project aims to eventually grow more than three million kilos of produce annually and offset 1% of the country's fresh produce imports.10
The Sustainable City has projects in the Middle East with locations such as Sharjah, Abu Dhabi, and Yeti, Oman. Specifically, The Sustainable City Dubai incorporates innovative food production systems to promote self-sufficiency. The development features urban farming initiatives, including biodomes and vertical gardens, that provide residents with fresh, locally grown produce year-round. Located along a central green spine, it incorporates a strip of communal greenhouses, urban farming plots, and hydroponic systems. The biodomes, where residents can grow their own vegetables, are designed by Alesca Life Technologies & Trotec, an AgriTech company based in Dubai, Tokyo, and Beijing. Specialising in vertical farming, they utilise advanced techniques such as hydroponics and aquaponics, which require less water and land compared to traditional farming.11
Potentials for Crossover
The aforementioned examples offer insights into operation, scale, and user interface with urban agriculture. While almost all of them are located within a dense residential urban setting, each case study offers its own unique insights into how those practices can be reimagined within the context of an Emirati neighbourhood. The case studies in Oakland, for example, provide opportunities for residents to learn about the food system and become active participants in agricultural practices. This also provides a learning ground for knowledge sharing, especially when it comes to passing on intangible heritage manifested in adaptive practices developed by residents in response to different locales, like the arid climate in the UAE. This is further emphasised by the immediacy of food transfer in the organopónico as well as revenue reallocation. Sales from food production zones could inform a systemisation of operation, where profit can go back into the greenhouse, supporting personnel working on its maintenance and upkeep. This could be further expanded by the ideas raised by Food Tech Valley which partners with local food suppliers and distributors to sell the produce. And finally, the centrality of the green spine in The Sustainable City physically situates the architectural element in the center of the neighbourhood, creating a formal impact and a social space.
Speculations
What if urban agriculture was viewed as an activator of interstitial space, where traditionally private spaces associated with domestic home activities cross the boundary into public space? The following speculative future of Emirati neighbourhoods demonstrates a redefinition of conventional enactments of public and private property through personal relationships based on an ethic of care for the land and social enactment of space. When urban food production crosses into the public realm, it inherently introduces a domestic element, thereby forcing us to re-examine preconceived notions of commerce and domestic caring as well as the rethinking of the separation between private/domestic activities and public uses of land. Striking a balance between the use of the domestic space and the public realm is key.
"What if urban agriculture was viewed as an activator of interstitial space, where traditionally private spaces associated with domestic home activities cross the boundary into public space?"
We examine a new take on urban agriculture in the unique setting of the UAE, in addressing food insecurity from a systems perspective: one that takes into consideration scale and human participation but also the policies that govern the process in which food is produced, processed, distributed, and consumed. Using imaginative scenarios, how can architecture contribute to greater food security and new conceptions of space?
While the typical urban dweller today has little understanding of where or how food is produced and distributed, this project aims to integrate architecture and food production into the Emirati urban fabric, proposing a third space: where food production and social fabric interact, allowing UAE residents to become active participants in achieving food security goals.
Expanding on the kit-of-parts, a few neighbourhoods were identified in response to the project’s application and imagined as possible venues of proliferation. This includes an experimentation of integration on the scales of the household and neighbourhood. When the urban strategy was studied and outlined, the following locations were selected due to certain characteristics where a multitude of experimental scenarios could take place, reflecting the kit-of-parts’ versatility and adaptability to the urban context in an arid environment. They allowed for retroactively integrating those kits into their existing infrastructure. Not only was the overall neighbourhood layout and its spatial planning compatible with the project’s integration, but also each one contained sufficient lot sizes as well as existing infrastructure, such as parks, that have irrigation systems in them that could be tapped into.
"When urban food production crosses into the public realm, it inherently introduces a domestic element, thereby forcing us to re-examine preconceived notions of commerce and domestic caring as well as the rethinking of the separation between private/domestic activities and public uses of land."
Al Safa 2, Dubai:
Unique characteristics: Variety of residential lots
Typical plot size: 1134- 1395 m2
Infrastructural and public spaces: Umm Suqeim Girls School and Safa Park 2
Zoning: Mixed-use
Speculative Scenario 1: Backyard
It’s the first week of July: a week of cucumber harvest. The splashing of children in the pool has fallen silent after a hot day in the sun. Amina, a resident in Dubai, walks out her back door with her son and heads to the greenhouse to collect their share for the month. This greenhouse assembly belongs to the residential compound and is maintained by a regular service fee included in her rent to supplement electricity and water usage. Families take turns tending to it, pruning leaves, checking moisture levels, and ensuring that the fans are turned on when they should be.
Walking under the retractable shade, she hears the bustle of the harvesters as she walks into the cooler interior space, along with the whirring of fans and the dripping of water on the evaporative cooling pads. The neighbours have already distributed most of the cucumbers in the residents’ designated baskets. Along the wooden table in the interior, her neighbours are slicing cucumbers for fresh salads, while others are swapping pickling jars. “Mom, did you know that cucumbers are some of the only crops that can survive the UAE’s heat in a greenhouse?” asked her son as he toyed around with the long vines. “Can we grow green peppers, tomatoes, and lettuce when the weather gets better, like we did last year?”
Al Shahba, Sharjah:
Unique characteristics: Residential center with a green spine on the east border and retail on the west border
Typical plot size: 450-2000 m2
Infrastructural and public spaces: Taryam Omran Secondary School, Ibn Seena English High School and Shahba Park
Zoning: Mixed-use
Speculative Scenario 2: Edge
Late November usually marks the beginning of the season for vegetable sharing in the UAE. Since the new greenhouse assemblies were installed in the neighbourhood, one for each interested family, Salem took on managing an assembly for his household consumption. He inherited his love of agriculture from his late father, who was an Al Dhaid native.
While he helped with putting up some of the greenhouse structures himself, his nightly routine now involves checking on the greenhouse, turning off the pump for the evaporative cooling pad, and opening roof panels so cooler autumn air can circulate during nighttime. His daughter, who was helping him that evening, made sure to unfold the green shade net so it could shield the leaves from the morning sun. She brushes her hands along the rough CMU surface that hasn’t fully cooled down yet as they head home. “Dad!” she exclaims, “we forgot the box of zucchini for Auntie in the greenhouse.”
Mohamed Bin Zayed City (Z31), Abu Dhabi:
Unique characteristics: Typical residential lot
Typical plot size: 2025 m2
Infrastructural and public spaces: Al Angham Park (contains a cafeteria and a mini market) and Al Wahah Park
Zoning: Residential
Speculative scenario 3: Center
On Friday afternoons, Moza picks up her younger sister Fatma after school. They make a weekly visit to the local park that has integrated a greenhouse in their neighbourhood in Abu Dhabi. This project is part of a larger scheme, a collaboration between the municipality and the Agriculture and Food Safety Authority. While Fatma and Moza used to visit the park sparingly in the past, their weekly visits have become routine, especially when they started buying the park’s local produce for their family.
It’s the middle of February and a crisp breeze rustles the tree's leaves in the park. As the girls park the car, Fatma can see her cousins waiting for her by the greenhouse with its green shade net down. She was excited for this week’s harvest: strawberries from Greenhouse Assembly A. While all the greenhouse assemblies in the park grow crops in rotation, this one is nearing the end of the berry season. She always looks forward to papaya, grapes, and pineapples in the summer, but the fresh eggs that come out of Greenhouse Assembly C are her favorite. “Don’t forget to get the eggs for Mom from the dukan12 before we go home,” Moza reminded her. “You know how particular she gets about the park’s eggs.”
Conclusion
The story of how our food is grown and gets from farm to plate is an important one. While vertical farms claim that they can “feed the world in the twenty-first century,” those instances often follow a specific food system model of profit maximisation and resource use efficiency, subscribing to specific logics that usually prioritise yield and performance.13 The rise of urban agriculture cannot go unnoticed as a vital strategy for building the resilience of a city’s food supply. In the West, classic definitions of urban agriculture increase employment and improve nutritional outcomes. While urban agriculture is not considered a fool-proof strategy, when combined with effective city-region planning, the food production system can more efficiently meet the needs of populations residing in urban areas.
"The rise of urban agriculture cannot go unnoticed as a vital strategy for building the resilience of a city’s food supply."
The UAE currently hosts more than 200 nationalities who live and work in the country. While the Emirati population constitutes 11.6% of the total population, the South Asian contingent constitutes 59.4%, which includes Indian 38.2%, Bangladeshi 9.5%, Pakistani 9.4%, other 2.3%).14 One of the conversations that I had with Dr. Majid Al Qassimi, from Soma Mater, illustrated an interesting analogy with regards to knowing when the UAE has achieved its intended food security: making sure it sufficiently produces the ingredients needed for biryani and karak, or maintains adequate reserves for its production. Even though this analogy provides insight into how elusive the definitions of food security and self-sufficiency can be in the UAE, there is something to be said about activating underutilised public spaces in neighbourhoods as systemised sites of food production. The expansion of new residential communities allows us the opportunity to rethink the structure of a residential neighbourhood, all the while harnessing the nation's natural resources and keeping pace with a continued population boom and surging demand for housing and infrastructure. This speculation takes a moment to reflect on the future of Emirati neighbourhoods, offering new generations new modes of living among sites of active food production.
Bio
Azza Aboualam is an Emirati architect and curator of the National Pavilion for the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for the 19th International Architecture Exhibition at La Biennale di Venezia in 2025. She is an Assistant Professor at the College of Arts and Creative Enterprises at Zayed University, Dubai, UAE, and a Co-founder and Director of Research at Holesum Studio, an interdisciplinary architecture and design practice based between New York, US, and Sharjah, UAE. In 2021, she co-founded the studio a few years after graduating from the Yale School of Architecture. Her scholarly interests include the intersection of memory, architecture, and society in the Middle East and North Africa.
Notes
1On October 5, 2024, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, Vice President and Ruler of Dubai, unveiled “Plant the Emirates,” an initiative launched to boost agricultural development and enhance the nation's food security. "The national programme aims to spread the culture of agriculture in every school and home, and in our new generations. The programme aims to increase our food security, develop our agricultural technologies, build new partnerships with the private sector and spread the green area in our country to ensure its sustainability.” See: “Sheikh Mohammed announces Plant the Emirates project to boost agriculture in UAE,” in The National, October 6, 2024.
2Tohme Tawk, Salwa & Said, Mounir & Hamadeh, Shady. (2014). Urban Agriculture and Food Security in the Middle Eastern Context. 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199361786.003.0007.
3Katy Gillett, “UAE primed for desert expansion and 15-minute cities to keep pace with population boom,” in The National, December 4, 2024.
4Sarah Meehan, “Urban Farm Coming to Former Sparrows Point Steel Mill Site in Baltimore County,” Baltimore Sun, May 8, 2018, accessed May 10, 2018, http://www.baltimoresun.com/business/bs-md-sparrows-point-farm-20180508-story.html.
5Urban is of, relating to, or constituting a city or town. See https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/urban
6"Urban Gardens," Phat Beets Produce, accessed January 19, 2025, http://www.phatbeetsproduce.org/urban-gardens/#dover.
7Andrea Basche, "Urban Farm-Fed Cities: Lessons from Cuba’s Organopónicos," SAGE Magazine, accessed January 19, 2025, https://sagemagazine.org/urban-farm-fed-cities-lessons-from-cubas-organoponicos/.
8Ibid.
9"About Food Tech Valley," Food Tech Valley, accessed January 19, 2025, https://www.foodtechvalley.ae/node/9.
10“ReFarm Global, IGS break ground on GigaFarm project in Dubai,” Oil and Gas News, OGN, January 2025 (Volume: 42 / Issue: 1).
11The Sustainable City, "Dubai," accessed January 6, 2025, https://thesustainablecity.com/cities/dubai/.
12Neighbourhood scale convenience store in UAE neighbourhoods.
13Alana Siegner, Jennifer Sowerwine, and Charisma Acey, "Does Urban Agriculture Improve Food Security? Examining the Nexus of Food Access and Distribution of Urban Produced Foods in the United States: A Systematic Review," Sustainability 10, no. 9 (2018): 2988, https://doi.org/10.3390/su10092988.
14Central Intelligence Agency, "United Arab Emirates," The World Factbook, last updated January 9, 2025, https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/countries/united-arab-emirates/
