Pastures New: The Biospheric Project

With a theatre- and music-centric programme, the biennial Manchester International Festival (MIF) is ostensibly a festival of art and culture, but as Jennifer Cleary, the event's director of Creative Learning, explains, it “has always had an interest in exploring the urgent stories of our time.” This year, these urgent stories extend to issues of food production and distribution, both in terms of environmental impact and health. Food – the obtaining, preparation, eating and disposal of it, our attitudes towards it – is also, of course, deeply interwoven with culture and community. It is this relationship, as well as the development of new food farming technologies, that is at the heart of The Biospheric Project, a co-initiative between MIF Creative, the festival's community-orientated arm, and Salford's Biospheric Foundation (a working experiment in urban food farming that, for around a year, has been distributing fresh fruit and vegetables via a 'veg-box' scheme to local residents in the area surrounding its Salford site). Within The Biospheric Project, architects, scientists, designers and researchers will work together with local people and the general public to develop practical and innovative new ways to produce food on a 'hyper-localised' scale – a term introduced by Vincent Walsh, director of the Biospheric Foundation, to describe a system whereby food grown at the project will then be sold in a whole-foods shop, only 78 steps away.

The festival's interest in urban food production dates back to 2011's Vertical Farm, which was inspired by professor Dickson Despommier, a pioneer of research into high-rise farming. Cleary recounts how the project “was intended to bridge the 2011 festival and the 2013 festival, to create a vertical farm in Manchester.” However, as the festival conducted feasibility studies into Despommier's chosen site, a tower block in Wythenshawe, they encountered insurmountable complications. “There were various problems with the building,” Cleary relates; “the size and condition, plus the ability to bring in different sources of income, as we needed to use it as an events space and an academic space, as well as to grow food.” The original site had to be abandoned – although MIF have continued to work with the community there to secure funding in order to run their own sustainable food project, Real Food Wythenshawe – but when the MIF team became acquainted with the Biospheric Foundation, they recognised a chance to realise their original aims: “The guys at the Biospheric Foundation had a vision to create a vertical farm over 10 years and were already tenants at the Biospheric Project site,” Cleary explains. The resulting partnership has, in turn, enabled the Biospheric Foundation to radically accelerate their plans, as Walsh confirms: “We've just about put the foundations down,” he says, “and without MIF I wouldn't be at this stage now, the plan was to be at this stage in around seven years. The festival came along and helped to push the project forwards.”

The Biospheric Project site, an ex-printworks and plot of land on the banks of the River Irwell, is currently under renovation in anticipation of the festival, with a freshly muck-spread forest garden nestled in among tower blocks, and a few working examples of growing technologies already up and running indoors. By the time the festival opens on 5 July, there will be several distinct spaces ready for visitors, which are what make the site so ideal: “It's right next to the river,” Cleary says, “with a plot of land outside where we can look at outdoor growing, a big flat roof space so that we can look at roof growing, and two floors inside; one of which is for indoor technological growing systems, and one of which is an events space... it's a site with much more potential, and, more importantly, it came with a group of people with that commitment to take it on for 10 years.”

During the festival, a programme of free events will provide visitors with the opportunity to explore how ancient growing techniques, such as aquaponics and vermiponics, are being updated and put to use at the project. “How we can merge our new technologies with ancient technologies is a really interesting thing,” says Walsh, explaining how these growing systems relate to the way most of our food is produced now. “From a sustainability point of view, as we develop these systems we can monitor them with the same kind of intensity that you find within a monoculture farming system (growing a single crop over a wide area). You can either develop massive monoculture systems that produce massive amounts of food, [which is what] in some ways made cities possible, but at the same time have a massive environmental impact – or you can turn around and look at how we can develop very intense localised food systems that allows for biodiversity and carbon stores, an facilitate education, discussion and research, whereas monoculture systems just produce food.”

Among the project's events programme will be a series of talks exploring the topics of sustainability, urban planning and food. “We've got some of the leading voices from architecture, design and food culture, and from the Institute of Sustainable Cities, New York, talking about how important food is to cities, and how projects like this could start a revolution in the way cities feed themselves, ” Cleary explains. There will also be a tour departing from Albert Square, in which participants will walk to The Biospheric Project, demonstrating the Salford site's close proximity to central Manchester.

While these grittier discussions concerning the socio-political issues around urban food production are undoubtedly interesting and important, The Biospheric Project also offers something that is, in essence, quite simple: a practical and realistic way to provide healthy, nutritious and abundant food for a community, satisfying at least some of the scepticism regarding whether the technologies and theories presented could actually work. Walsh explains that it is essential the project is able to function as a food provider in competition with supermarkets and take-aways. “We mapped all the places to eat in Salford, 63 places, and only two selling local produce,” he says. “While [other initiatives] are telling customers to eat more healthily, we are trying to provide the resources for those customers to use.”

With its boldly interdisciplinary approach, ideally The Biospheric Project will be able to fill in a few gaps in current thinking, illuminating how environment, community, well-being and food are linked in an urban environment – and possible ways in which this relationship can be harnessed, leading to a more sustainable future. Crucially, its events aim to explore and represent these vital issues in ways that non-experts can understand and experience. “It's very much about people being able to come in, chat to the people who are running the site, see the different spaces, try your hand at being able to do different things, taste different things that'll be made from the crops that are being grown,” Cleary says.

And once the touring, tasting and trying-out of the festival is over, The Biospheric Project will continue, with ambitions to produce enough crops to supply local restaurants as well as residents – always in collaboration with the surrounding community. “Sustainability isn't something that happens within policy houses, or academic research,” Walsh affirms, emphatically. “It is a people's activity. You have to take part to make it work. We can do as much theoretical stuff as possible, to find out what sustainability means for cities, but to actually make that happen we have to be active on the ground.”