Planning Grant: Engineering Research Center for Urban Agricultural Infratructure Systems

In the 21st Century, agriculture, technology, urbanization, population growth, community culture, and consumer demand will come together to create new pathways for the large-scale production of nutritional and safe food, generation of jobs, improvement of human health, management of resources, treatment and production of water, and efficient use of energy. Newly-structured and improved nutrient, energy, water, and transportation (NEWT) systems will diversify, decentralize, localize, and democratize food production, processing, and distribution in urban areas where most people will live and where NEWT (and labor) resources are readily available and often wasted. Due to the synergistic benefits from reducing NEWT inputs for food production, some commercial food can be better grown locally using high-tech and high land-area productivity Controlled Environmental Agriculture (CEA) systems compared to the products that they would displace. For this vision to be realized at commercial scale, however, a host of challenges must be overcome in the fields of civil and environmental engineering, CEA, urban planning, food safety, health and nutritional science, supply chain management, and consumer science. Research at the scale of an Engineering Research Center is needed to study novel optimized technology-driven CEA systems that can achieve high areal food productivity to increase the food and nutritional security in urban areas with low operating cost and reduced energy and water consumption. This planning grant will enable the building of a diverse research, education, and innovation team that identifies and develops leaders that are effective in managing team science efforts and skilled in the best practices for managing large research centers. This team will develop and practice effective means for inclusive collaboration and decision-making among disciplinary, geographically and demographically diverse partners. Additionally, the planning grant team will jointly develop a 10-year roadmap of research, education, and innovation that would enable the vision for urban agricultural infrastructure systems to be realized. To accomplish these goals, the planning grant team will conduct a series of leader-building activities, diversity and inclusion training, and science communications exercises. These activities will help all participants become more effective leaders, better administrators and stewards of research resources, articulate communicators of complex science and engineering phenomena, skilled builders of diverse research teams, and knowledgeable and adaptable practitioners of team science. While investigators are typically selected for teams based on their research expertise, most have received no formal training in leadership, team science, diversity and inclusion, scientific communication, and other underpinning skills. These are critical skills that large research teams need if they are to succeed. Through a shared experience, participants also will develop multi-generational and mentoring relationships.

The team, and the diverse partners it will recruit through this grant, will begin identifying the shared values upon which future urban agricultural infrastructure systems will be built. This will require the team to consider multiple objectives and perspectives, and to develop a roadmap for the next 10 years that will describe the work that needs to done to 1) uncover the interconnections, interdependencies, and synergies among urban infrastructure systems and food producing agricultural systems; 2) work with industry and government to create the technologies, policies, programs, and markets for urban agriculture to succeed at the commodity scale; 3) develop and test the laws, rules, standards, and best practices for siting, designing, building, and operating sustainable and resilient urban agricultural systems; 4) develop the practice of teaching engineered urban agricultural systems; 5) recruit and train the first generation of engineers, scientists, designers, managers, and analysts, that are as diverse as the communities in which they will serve; and 6) foster agricultural technology entrepreneurship within a start-up ecosystem while training students to pursue intellectual property development, social entrepreneurship, and sustainable technology transfer.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.