The Park Supermarket

In many countries around the world, there has traditionally been a distinction between where the majority of the population lives — in built-up city areas — and the surrounding countryside or rural areas further afield, which are typically where food is grown to support the city residents.

Rotterdam-based firm van Bergen Kolpa Architecten is challenging that division with its new project for an outdoor Park Supermarket in the heart of urban Holland.

The Park Supermarket model, which made the shortlist in the World Architecture Awards 2011 (in the Future Projects–Landscape category) is based on the cultivation and harvesting of food in the metropolitan parks of the Randstad. It allows people to select vegetables straight from the plots where they are grown.

Van Bergen Kolpa Architecten’s Jago van Bergen says: “The Park Supermarket is based on small flexible plots of one hectare (2.5 acres) or more based on the existing Dutch Polder structure.”

In all, about 4000 acres of land would be converted in the project to small-scale plots with grocery shopping. However, Park Supermarket is not just a food growing area — it is also a recreational space and an opportunity for city-dwellers to enjoy both nature and healthy food at their doorsteps.

“Food production and recreation space have to go together,” says van Bergen.

Meeting community needs

The Park Supermarket is planned to be easily accessible to residents — within a 10 minute drive by car or a 15 minute bike ride away.

It will also cater for the 177 cultural groups living in the area, by allowing residents to not just select produce from the plots, but to also have input into what vegetables they would like to be grown.

To cater for the variety of needs, the Park Supermarket includes the creation of three climate zones — moderate, Mediterranean and tropical — and raised water levels, to allow a diverse range of produce to be grown. The different zones will be powered using sustainable energy sources, such as locally-produced solar energy and geothermal heat. Warmth-storing snake-shaped walls, water spray roofs and floor heating will allow everything from risotto rice to avocados to be grown within the Park Supermarket.

Putting nature on the urban agenda

Ecologist and researcher Vincent Kuypers from the University of Wageningen (which is the Dutch centre of expertise on rural areas), has worked on the project in conjunction with van Bergen Kolpa Architecten. He says that nature can actually be everywhere in city areas, and it can provide an important focal point for urban planning. For him, it is vital that nature be part of the urban agenda.

“For a long time, the emphasis in the Netherlands was on compact cities and open rural areas,” Kuypers says. “As a result, no attention was paid to green space within the cities, even though residents were screaming for it. This social stimulus led over the years to greater efforts to create green space in and around the cities.”

So will the Park Supermarket become a reality?

“At this moment, we are working with municipalities in the vicinity of Rotterdam and The Hague looking for concrete locations,” says Jago van Bergen.

“Our focus is city border areas that were originally planned to be developed as business estates or for the redevelopment of agricultural land to nature,” he says. “We are convinced that the Park Supermarket concept, combining food production and recreation, will be realised.”

Imagining new cities

Jago van Bergen and Evert Kolpa say that the focus of their architectural work is “the formation of balance–a natural equilibrium–between program, landscape and natural resources.”

They envisage new types of cities, buildings and landscapes that respond to and are appropriate for the challenges of 21st Century living.

“This makes the imaginative power of architecture, in an era marked by intensive space utilisation and by environmental challenges, of great importance and highly relevant for the future,” the pair say in a statement on their website.

The firm has already succeeded in meeting this vision in other projects, such as their community housing venture Cohousing Nabuurschappen, in which 48 families share a communal open space that includes a garden to grow their own grapes, pears and apples.

Their Park Supermarket concept is another example of what this imaginative architecture can be: a project that meets city people’s desire to live near green spaces while also providing for nutritional needs and recreational needs. Importantly, it is also environmentally-friendly and community-oriented.

The Park Supermarket is also unashamedly a move away from the modern global food industry trends in which produce is shipped and flown around the world. As van Bergen and Kolpa say, “Our food today has become entirely removed from its origins. How many children really know where their fish fingers come from?”

This gulf between food growing and food consumption, and the lack of knowledge about the origins of the food we eat, is bridged in a Park Supermarket project. Instead there is the vision of creating a flourishing and diverse range of freshly-grown food available at arm’s length — or, at most, a 15 minute bike ride away.

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