The New Green Acres

[Trakar]

Farm living with a penthouse view!
In a world where there is a premium of conserving resources and efficiency of energy usage, urban farming makes increasing sense.

… Urban farming has been building globally for decades. Today, urban farms provide more than half of

Beijing’s vegetable supply, and this local produce costs less than what’s trucked in from afar. Vancouver, Canada doles out low-cost leases for community food gardens on 284 plots of city-owned land. In Havana, Cuba, more than 70 percent of the produce is local and organic. In Sweden, developers are planning to build a 177-foot skyscraper that farms vegetables at the perimeter of each floor.
And though the U.S. is late to the game, we’re starting down the right path. Just eight years ago, when Jeanne began designing her first urban project — a 5,000-square-foot farm at the edge of Chicago’s Lincoln Park Zoo for Green City Market (one of the biggest farmers markets in America) — it was hard to imagine the colossal growth in urban farming that we’re seeing today. The farm at the zoo is now an instructional space for urban farming and composting techniques, hosting tens of thousands of visitors a year, including groups of soil and agrarian scientists and scores of Chicago public school students…

I think the literal greening of cities (through the enhancement of parks, the creation of green-strip corridors through the cities and integrated rooftop gardens and interior growth rooms) is a fantastic and growing trend. The addition of private and communal urban farming (and ranching) space to this greening movement, turns a good idea into a great way to address multiple needs in an integrated fashion.
There are some arguments about the economic sense of urban farming, but that largely depends upon the practices and conditions:

…People have been growing food in cities since

the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. At the height of World War II, American citizens grew 20 million victory gardens in their yards and parks, producing 40 percent of the nation’s vegetable supply. Now urban farming pioneers are redefining victory gardens with high-tech growing methods.
In the coming weeks we’ll introduce you to all sorts of innovative techniques, ranging from vertical farms to hydroponic “sky farms.” They may seem weird and space-agey, but whether the future of food will be grown in the soil or in the sky, under sunlight or pink LEDs, there’s a good chance it will be better for our kids and grandkids, and for the planet, than the chemically treated stuff grown thousands of miles away that now fills our grocery store shelves…

Quoted material from - http://www.babble.com/best-recipes/the-future-of-food-how-farming-in-cities-will-change-the-way-we-eat/