To enhance Hong Kong’s readiness for a wider seeding of urban farming practices and provide a solid basis for building towards sustainable food future. 

Given the escalating effects of climate change, intense urbanisation and population growth, there is a rising concern about sustainable food provisioning. Amidst overlapping uncertainties and challenges, high-technological, vertical and controlled farming in the urban area is increasingly positioned as a future-proof, and local food source untethered by the climate. High-technological farming often includes hydroponic or aquaponic practices, the use of LED light as sunlight, enclosed controlled growing environment and various automation measures. While these farming methods start to receive attention as a possible mode of climate adaptation, research surrounding the area in Hong Kong and around the world is still limited by an agrotechnological perspective. Framed in an interdisciplinary Environmental Humanities, this project brings the insights and approaches of the humanities into productive dialogue with agrotechnology and environmental science to examine this emerging and important farming landscape, with a specific focus on Hong Kong. Situating Care in Sustainable High-technological Urban Farming will deploy interwoven qualitative methods, specifically site visits, interviews, focus groups and comprehensive textual analysis. Grounded in rich empirical materials, the project will draw on and refigure the concepts of critical care, future, and more-than-human to develop an innovative conceptual approach through a care-based approach—care ecology—to account for, assess, and intervene in the contested narratives and practices of care and future in the making of urban farming. The central questions that guide this project include: What are the issues and limitations of the current narratives of care and technocratic mode of futuring that are mobilised in some urban farming practices? What are the multifaceted futures and relations enacted through, or impeded by the current and emerging technological, controlled urban farming practices, and their multispecies consequences? How might approaching urban farming through a critical lens of care along with the additional temporal and more-than-human dimensions open up spaces for more sustainable technological mode of agri-food production? The findings of the project will offer a critical social and cultural understanding of the subject that promises to enhance Hong Kong’s readiness for a wider seeding of urban farming practices and provide a solid basis for building towards sustainable food future. More broadly, the empirical and conceptual development will advance understandings in entangled human-environment-technology relations, serving as a test case for urban technological innovations in the time of climate crisis.