ABSTRACT

This chapter explores how insourcing food production may fix far-reaching problems of the current food system by, for example, deracinating eradicating environmentally harmful genetically modified organism (GMO)-dependent monocultures and replacing them with sustainable urban rooftop farms (URFs). The high urban population density provides a consistent customer base and an inherent task force to carry the urban farming models, especially on roofs, which provide “arable land” outside the real estate competition. Therefore, context-specific holistic upregulation is needed in the sense that existing zoning and local ordinances should not only encourage and incentivize, but also reward local food procurement from within the cities to reduce legal barriers and methods of insourcing to feed cities. This chapter explains the connections between the urban heat island effect (UHIE), climate change, and green -roofs;, introduces the laws underlying Stuttgart’s successful city greening; and discusses the shortcomings of existing US green-roof policy;, and, finally, introduces a model US zoning approach to reduce the UHIE.