Beyond Urban Agriculture

Building-Integrated Agriculture in urban contexts: Methodological contributions to sustainability assessment.
My research explores the environmental impacts of our food choices and their potential mitigation through high-yield urban agriculture. My methods and tools aim to empower the user to build the Urban FOODprint of his city and develop sustainable food concepts at the neighborhood level considering current technical feasibility, environmental performance and costs of controlled-environment agriculture.

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Khadija Benis
Research Associate
MIT Sustainable Design Lab / Urban Food Prints
Khadija Benis is an architect and urban planner, holding a PhD in Sustainable Energy Systems. She developed a framework for the environmental and economic sustainability assessment of Building-Integrated Agriculture (BIA) in urban contexts. At MIT, she developed HARVEST, a CAD-embedded tool for urban food production simulation, based on Urban Foodprints, a lifecycle-based method to estimate environmental impacts of urban food systems. Over the past years, she has been working on food systems-related projects in Europe, the United States, and the Middle East.
References
Development of a simulation-based decision support workflow for the implementation of Building-Integrated Agriculture (BIA) in urban contexts
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Urban Foodprints (UF) – Establishing baseline
scenarios for the sustainability assessment
of high-yield urban agriculture
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https://urbanfoodprints.com/#/