Vincent Walsh was searching for just such a place three years ago when he discovered it, a disused print works beside the River Irwell in Blackfriars, a deprived neighborhood in Salford, an industrial city near Manchester in north west England. The building and accompanying wasteland have since been transformed into an urban farm and research laboratory where Mr. Walsh and his collaborators are designing new ways of growing food in hostile conditions, and of distributing it to the residents of a nearby housing estate.
Dubbed the Biospheric Project, it will open to the public Thursday as part of the 2013 Manchester International Festival, the biannual cultural event, whose program also features the British band the XX and the artists Matthew Barney and Tino Sehgal. Visitors to the Biospheric Project can explore its food-growing technologies, buy local produce from a whole-foods store it has opened in the housing estate and attend workshops on beekeeping, mushroom growing and the design of forest gardens like the one being cultivated on the cleaned-up wasteland.
“We’re planning to make every inch of the building and every inch of the land productive,” Mr. Walsh said. “Though this is very, very early days in a 10-year project to develop an action-led research laboratory in an area of urban deprivation where it is really needed, because the access to food on this estate is so poor.”
At a time when eco-social design experiments intended to help people to live sustainably are increasingly popular among young designers, and cultural events like the Manchester festival are eager to commission work with an enduring impact on needy local communities, the Biospheric Project is unusually ambitious. All of its growing systems, both the organic ones in the forest garden and the technological versions inside the old print works, have been designed from scratch as prototypes that will be tested on site as a decade-long series of works in progress.
The project began when Mr. Walsh was planning his research for a doctorate in socio-ecological urban development at the Manchester School of Architecture at Manchester Metropolitan University. Having studied design in his first degree and worked on community projects in the U.S. and Africa, he completed a master’s degree in architecture and urbanism, and decided to focus his doctorate on action-led research into the politics of food in deprived inner urban areas.
To do so, he needed to identify a suitable community and premises that he could “rip apart,” as he put it, to create an urban research laboratory for himself and other doctoral students. Eventually he found them in the Blackfriars estate and Irwell House, which had stood empty for years except for a car repair shop on the first floor. The building was owned by the real estate developers Urban Splash, which had no immediate plans to renovate it and agreed to rent it for 10 years on a partly philanthropic basis. A year later, Mr. Walsh was approached by the Manchester International Festival, which has since raised funding to create the research laboratory and forest garden, and helped him to establish the Biospheric Project with his co-director, Greg Keeffe, professor of architecture at Queens University, Belfast.
The project now occupies the two upper floors of the building and the roof. One floor will be used for talks and workshops during the festival, then converted for mushroom production. Mr. Walsh and his colleagues are already testing ways of growing oyster, shiitake and turkey-tail mushrooms to sell to restaurants. On another floor, they are experimenting with new forms of aquaponic technology in which fish, vegetables and herbs are cultivated using the same water. They are designing systems that require less water than existing ones.
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