Richard Shorney

A supermarket in Brussels harvests vegetables at 8am. They're on the shelves by 9am. The farm is on the roof. Delhaize, a Belgian grocery chain, built a 360-square-meter rooftop farm above one of its stores where they grow tomatoes, lettuce, and strawberries year-round thanks to a greenhouse. Solar panels power it and the building's own radiant heat warms it in winter. We've spent a century building food systems optimized for scale and distance. A few cities and companies are quietly demonstrating that the opposite is possible: that food can be grown where people live and harvested the same morning it's eaten. Most flat roofs in most cities are doing nothing. Every single one of them is a missed opportunity.

Architects and urban designers routinely cite development outside Cambridge as exemplary. A perfect example of the “design disconnect” whereby elite opinion is almost perfectly misaligned with public taste. With a couple of modest exceptions,, it’s pretty grim stuff.

Every high street should do this

The Liverpool Cotton Exchange building. Matear and Simon. How it started in 1906. How it's been going since 1969. Of course C20 society will probably try its hardest to preserve the modern facade in perpetuity.

The best density is gentle .....

What we are all about, shame more people don't push this instead of their Tesco shopping carts.