Clare Lyster

Future Farm Forms is a research and design project that explores how synergies between cloud-based information technologies and agricultural production catalyze the design of new farm typologies with expanded program and collective space. The overwhelming amount of storage required to accommodate society's reliance on cloud-based systems is impacting the design of our cities and regions. Hyperscale big box data farms occupy vast footprints, demand enormous power, and release warm exhaust air into the atmosphere. Future Farm Forms explores the potential co-benefits between data and agriculture (farm + farm) toward the design of unique "info-agri adjacencies" that reshape the countryside and the city and that offer sustainable and artful relationships between food, land, and the socio-technical assemblages that underpin urban life. Through analysis, narrative and speculative design, the book reveals new typologies of architecture and landscape space that emerge from the synergies between data and agriculture.

In the 19th century railroads and canals provided both structure and motor for city development. This role has been taken over today by the global flow of data and products, as the author argues. Flow of material and communication is the DNA of contemporary environments. This development has enormous and partially unfathomable implications for our city fabric. Logistics networks and their complex structure increasingly bear upon many urban spheres. Counter trends to the ubiquitous internet retail trade – to name one of the most palpable phenomena – are gaining momentum as well, exemplified by the criticism of labor conditions in e-commerce and the trend to buy regional products from local stores. The author describes the current development and its impact on architecture, landscape architecture and urbanism: Aspects such as today’s hypermobility of both products and people have repercussions in design work and create new paradigms for architecture and urban design. Concepts for the integration of these new issues are introduced by a number of exemplary urban design projects.