See 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
- What kind of food would be suitable for this Scenario?
- How much food could be produced in 5 months?
- 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
- What kind of food would be suitable for this Scenario?
-> Potatoes because it consists a lot of nutritional value - How many food could be produced in 5 months?
-> 126’562’500 kg potatoes - How long could we feed the population of Zurich (city not canton) with this amount of food?
-> 85 Days
Please watch below! 😉
See here the potato future of Zurich visualized »
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 »
☴ Our sponsors and partners » (the-horse.education)
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!