Skywalk Farming and Interactive Space: The Application of Urban Farming in Urban Area as a Media for Reducing Outdoor Temperature, Improving Economic Quality, Environmental Education, and City Reforestation

Abstract

Urban areas have some environmental problems, which are the lack of productive and green lands. It’s caused by the excessive of energy consumption, and the increasing of air temperature day by day. It makes urban area becomes more uncomfortable to be lived and makes environmental’s health level keeps going down, then decrease the society productivity. Those problems should be resolved in order to create more liveable urban spaces and to gain the benefit of economic aspect for the society. One of the methods to solve those problems is through urban design concept and urban farming implementation. Urban farming is growing, cultivating, and distributing the foodstuffs into the city or city limits to generate income. This research aimed to determine how much the affection of urban farming to the temperature reduction of urban heat island by using software Envi-met and LEONARDO to simulate and evaluate the urban farming morphology. Three design alternative were simulated in the city that had been affected by Urban Heat Island. The software would show which design was the best to reduce the outdoor temperature. As the result, the design alternative which could reduce the outdoor air temperature optimally (1.16 ºC-1.23 ºC) was by placing the vegetation higher than the sidewalk or usually called by skywalk. The skywalk was placed three meters high above the sidewalk, and designed along one kilometer on both sides of the sidewalk. The sidewalks were planted by rice and crops plants depends on the season. The planted plants would be processed then harvested to be foodstuffs for society itself. This design was also intended to provide more productive and green lands, recreational land, and environmental education land to improve economic and food quality. This skywalk farming design contained interactive places to do direct communication, any discussion, while watching gardening was being processed in urban area.