Over half a million people visited the urban agriculture exhibition of the Ciutadella Park

For nine months uninterruptedly thousands of visitors passed daily through the “Climatic Machine” exhibition in the Greenhouse of the Ciutadella Park, organised by the Municipal Institute of Parks and Gardens of Barcelona. Visitors were able to see tomato and bean crops growing in the greenhouse's Picasso hall, prepared in the facilities of the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology of the UAB (ICTA-UAB). Designed using the contents worked on by the UAB research group Sostenipra, the exhibition was completed with three audiovisual productions, a vertical garden and a model designed by the Institute of Advanced Architecture of Catalonia (IAAC). The maintenance of the hydroponic crops was carried out by the company Tectum Garden, a spin-off company of the UAB, specialised in urban gardens.

In a three-part tour, the exhibition aimed at uniting knowledge and art to address three concepts around greenhouses and the greenhouse effect, distributed in each of the three rooms of the installation: the past of greenhouses in the Magnòlies hall; art, science and the greenhouse effect in the central space; and the future of these installations as a response to a more sustainable food in the Picasso hall.

“It has undoubtedly been the most visited urban agriculture exhibition in the world, surpassing half a million visits in 269 days,” explains Xavier Gabarrell, head of the Sostenipra group at UAB and vice-rector of Campus and Sustainability at the UAB. The exhibition integrated hydroponics trays for food production following the model of the ICTA-UAB Urban Agriculture Laboratory. Visitors could see the growth of plants and the functioning of food production in buildings, from the data obtained in the Fertilecity project started in 2014, and in other research projects that have been developed at ICTA-UAB over the past 10 years. During these 269 days, two cycles of tomato planting (with 48 plants in each cycle) were carried out, the first of which lasted until September and the second until the end of the year, to give way to the planting and cultivation of broad beans.

The exhibition ended last Sunday 2 March with a ceremony in which UAB Rector Javier Lafuente and Vice-Rector of Campus and Sustainability Xavier Gabarrell participated.