Högdalen Farm, Sweden

In the southern suburb of Högdalen, Stockholm beneath a shopping centre, you can find a high-technology farming space. Fresh herbs and lettuce are being grown in this underground farm as part of the innovation project Odlande stadsbasarer (Growing City Bazaars).

Connected through the vision of a sustainable, employment-creating urban development cities, organizations and companies work together on this small-scale urban agriculture project. They aim to inspire and support the development of local markets for locally produced food and services plus to provide climate-driven property owners with good investment models.

The innovative project combines the growth of plants with creating jobs. (source: Odlande stadsbasarer www 2022)

Odlande stadsbasarer is being accompanied through the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) and Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU). In their paper from 2019, the KTH-researchers Rebecka Milestad, Annika Carlsson-Kanyama and Christina Schaffer examine the viability of indoor farming coupled with a “real-live” greenhouse gas (GHG) emission assessment and an evaluation of the project’s social performance. They found that ‘…the farm did not contribute to food security’, mainly because it is small and mainly producing lettuce which is not essential for food provision. On the other hand it ‘[…]contribute[s] to sustainable urban development […] by the good cooperation between commercial, public and civil society partners, by the use of unused urban space, by the aim to create jobs, by the link to circular flows in the city and by the ambition to increase attractivity of a suburban centre in need of just this’. They add the general multifunctional benefits and ecosystem services of urban outdoor agriculture as Bohn & Viljoen examine in their CPUL work, f.e. the connectivity of the landscape and green corridors in urban space.

Odlande stadsbasarer runs three pilot projects in Sweden. (source: Odlande stadsbasarer www 2022)

In Högdalen, the production can be active all year-round while the surplus is being used for social activities. Odlande stadsbasarer also run a project in Landskrona with a transformation of Fröfabriken and an aquaponic project in Helsingborg, combining  vegetable crops and eel.

+++ researched and written by our colleague Antonia +++

For (further) information see the project’s own website.
https://odlandestadsbasarer.se/engelska/project/

A short video about Högdalen urban farm by one of its partners, Citycon, can be found here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x02S_eT-tso

The article The Högdalen urban farm: a real case assessment of sustainability attributes by Rebecka Milestad, Annika Carlsson-Kanyama and Christina Schaffer was published in Food Security (2020), see here.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12571-020-01045-8#citeas

For (further) information about the article on our blog see
https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/pulr/2020/06/11/swedish-researchers-complex-study-of-the-pros-and-cons-of-urban-indoor-farming/.

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