A farm above Larimer Square is the test lab for the greener Denver of the future.
There are a lot of things growing above Larimer Square. And it’s not just vegetables in the 40 planter boxes that have replaced parking spots atop the garage. The elevated farm, dubbed Larimer Uprooted, is a testing ground for what rooftop agriculture could look like in the city.
There are a lot of unknowns when it comes to growing plants so high up, especially in the country’s interior. Big coastal cities have already established how to run large-scale operations on roofs in their ecosystems, but it’s still the wild west here.
Denver, in particular, also has never had to fit anything like this in its zoning code. Larimer Uprooted is creating the handbook on how to get projects like this started and successfully growing, literally, as they work up a case study on their experiment.
As climate change and food scarcity become larger existential threats, it’s time society begin to rethink what urban spaces should accomplish. The CEO of Biological Capital and Urban Villages, Grant McCargo imagines a not-too-distant future when many of the restaurants on the street below source ingredients on site. It’s incumbent on all of us, he said, to become more efficient.
McCargo’s team is using all kinds of tech to conduct their study. Kennedy brings a “mobile weather station” up to the roof to monitor conditions and keep records as they go. He’s been measuring normal and infrared temperatures daily.
They’ve learned that crops grown from seed, rather than those transplanted from ground level, fare the best. Wild native plants are doing pretty well up there, but the vegetables have required more experimentation. They’re close to figuring out how to provide enough nutrition without overloading the structure beneath it.
Planting six stories high has its perks, too. There’s no veggie-eating deer or rabbits to worry about, and they’ve avoided weeds that might otherwise have sprung up from dormant seeds.
Farms like these go above and beyond satisfying the city’s Green Buildings Ordinance, but there may be incentives to grow big in the near future.
In 2017, a successful citizen-led ballot initiative created a “green roof ordinance” that required large new structures and renovations to include green space in their designs. A year later, the city tweaked the measure to include a suite of options that would satisfy new sustainability goals.
Today, new buildings measuring larger than 25,000 square feet can create green space, pay into a green building fund, install on-site solar panels, design for LEED certification (or equivalent) or create some mix of these choices to meet what is now called the “Green Buildings Ordinance.”
Roofing permits held steady back when the original ordinance passed. Christy Collins, who runs the city’s green building program, said developers have continued to accept the rules in the years since.
About 30 projects have been completed since the rules were enacted. She said about 50 more are making their ways through the process.
Fulfilling the ordinance will be no problem for McCargo and his team once Larimer Square renovations start. They’re building way beyond what the rules stipulate. But Collins said ambitious projects like Uprooted could be rewarded in the future.
The city is in the process of updating building and fire codes to match international standards. In parallel, officials are working up a list of “stretch codes” and “green codes,” optional goals that would come with financial rewards for developers. Collins said they’re still figuring out what those incentives would be, exactly, but they would all be attached to sustainability features like energy efficiency and, maybe, rooftop farms.
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