A brief recap: Urban Greenhouse Challenge info-meeting

Did you miss the last info-meeting about the current edition of the Urban Greenhouse Challenge? Do not worry, because here we will provide you with a short recap of this last session.

On the 11th of September, a vast amount of students interested in the Urban Greenhouse Challenge gathered in Impulse to find out more about the challenge. Students with a variety of study backgrounds - such as the social sciences, horticulture, environmental studies and architecture – were present, which already points to the interdisciplinary character of the student challenge.

After some general information on the Urban Greenhouse Challenge (which can all be found on the website) was given, it was time to hear how Fruzsina Nagy from the winning team (GreenWURks )of last year’s Urban Greenhouse Challenge experienced the challenge. Fruzsina told that she and 8 other students with varying backgrounds and nationalities were motivated to do something valuable besides their studies and therefore joined the Urban Greenhouse Challenge. They started up an organization, doubled their team to 16 people as the challenge proceeded, all in order to design the best greenhouse. Although it was hard to transform all the ideas of 16 students into one coherent plan, the team managed to come up with the winning design! For Fruzsina, participating in the Urban Greenhouse Challenge helped her finding an internship and left her with many new connections. Furthermore, she participated in several interviews after the challenge and is still engaged with her team’s NGO GreenWURks.

After these interesting insights into participating in the challenge were shared by Fruzsina, it was time for a presentation from Gert Spaargaren, Professor at Wageningen University. In his talk on the social aspects of urban farming, Gert underlined that urban space is very scarce. So hence the question that follows is: why is it actually a good idea to grow food in an urban environment? Gert explained that first of all, urban farming reconnects people to food production as it shortens supply chains and allows the consumer to see and experience food production more closely. Besides that, urban farming adds to the social and environmental quality of city-life. An urban greenhouse should hence not only function to produce food but should combine a number of key functionalities, among which for instance social ones. To come up with a way to combine multiple functionalities within a greenhouse will be an exciting challenge for the student teams participating in the Urban Greenhouse Challenge.

Finally, the info-meeting was concluded with a Q&A during which students could ask anything about the challenge. Some of these questions and answers can be found in the FAQ on our website. Student(teams) can register to participate in the Urban Greenhouse Challenge here.