Cultivable parking spaces in Zurich

Click to see the potato futureSee Zurich’s visualized potato future »

OMG! Because of too many too hot days one “bad rocket” tried to escape into space but did not manage it and now the world is in flame. This is the beginning of the 3th world war!

We can’t believe that. It seems so surreal. Now there are a lot of nations involved in this conflict. The global trade is completely out of control. So we need to produce our own food in Switzerland. To earn more food we have got an idea. What would be if we use our parking spaces to produce food?

Luckily there are no sweating rockets. But the idea with the parking spaces is still interesting. You never know what will happen in the future so it’s good to have some emergency plans.

So…WELCOME to our scenario – Cultivable parking spaces in Zurich!

Questions

  1. What kind of food would be suitable for this Scenario?
  2. How much food could be produced in 5 months?
  3. How long could we feed the population of Zurich (only adults) with this amount of food?

Calculation

The city government wrote us that there are approximately 380’000 parking spaces. One space has mostly 12 m2.

Calculation What does the calculation say?
380’000 x 12m2 = 4.56km2 Total space to plant the potatoes
75 x 4.5kg = 337.5kg Total kilogram of potatoes for one parking space
4.5m2 / 0.00000016 = 28’125’000 Total seeds we can plant
28’125’000 x 4.5 kg = 126’562’500 kg Total potatoes in kilogram
126’562’500kg x 700 = 8.859375×1010 Total calories of all the new potatoes seeds
2500kcal Daily demand for one adult in kcal
8.859375×1010 / 2500kcal = 35’437’500kcal Daily demand of kcal with our seeds
35’437’500 / 415’682 = 85 days How long we can feed the population of Zurich

Conclusion

  1. What kind of food would be suitable for this Scenario?
    -> Potatoes because it consists a lot of nutritional value 
  2. How many food could be produced in 5 months?
    -> 126’562’500 kg potatoes
  3. How long could we feed the population of Zurich (city not canton) with this amount of food?
    -> 85 Days
parking-potatoes
Potato plants growing on parking spaces

Please watch below! 😉
See  here the potato future of Zurich visualized »

Click to see the potato future

Sources

  • Ms. Waiblinger (Nature science expert, March 26th)
  • Birkenhof (Local farmer, email on March 23th)
  • Zurich city government, environment department (email on March 21th)

Team Zurich: Pascal, Simon

☷ See the project teams here »
☵ Some words about the contributions »

One thought on “Cultivable parking spaces in Zurich

  1. How cute is this! 🙂 Make P’s not PS ! … potatoes instead of parking spaces … I like fries! I also suggest to plant hedges because of a better city climate and for the birds, bees and other creatures!

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