A consequence of urbanization trend: vertical farming

I currently run internal discussions around Megatrends, in order to determine their effect on my company and our customer segments. As those of you who follow this blog know (for the others: I'll post a short overview of the process later this week), I organize 'Think tank' discussions around 6 megatrend topics: (1) sustainability, (2) Socio-Demographics, (3) Geopolitcs, (4) Technology, (5) Consumers and (6) Globalization.

One of the socio-demographic megatrends we discussed is Urbanization. No doubt the amount of people living in urban areas is increasing, as does the amount of 'megacities':

This poses specific challenges of sustainability, security, transport, etc. But perhaps the biggest challenge is to keep these growing cities livable. Feeding the citizens in itself will become a challenge, as the growing city 'eats' away more and more farming land around it. The answer to this? Vertical farming...

Some people on the Think Tank laughed at the idea, but as these 2 video's from The Economist show, it is getting very real...





Of course, vertical farming is not the only technological innovation to respond to the challenges of Urbanization. We can expect a broad variety of innovations to respond to its challenges...