Designing More Resilient Cities With Agritecture’s Junior Designer

Editor’s Note: Get to know the amazing team at Agritecture! This interview features Dhwani Laddha, Junior Designer at Agritecture Consulting.

Pathway To Agritecture

Working out of New York City, Dhwani has been part of Agritecture’s family since September 2020. With the aspiration of “transforming how our cities and societies function: remodeling cities to be more resilient, and as a result, refocusing societies to become more sustainable,” Dhwani has been interested in the roles urban agriculture and food systems play in establishing stronger cities and communities.

With her varied interests in design and sustainability, Dhwani earned her Bachelor’s of Fine Arts in Integrated Design, with a minor in Sustainable Cities, from Parsons, The New School for Design. As an interdisciplinary designer, she also picked up skills in marketing, graphic design, sustainable design strategy, community garden design, and landscape architecture through past internships and freelance opportunities. 

Building Her Relationship With Food Systems Resilience

Growing up in Dubai, food insecurity was always a topic on Dhwani’s mind. She remembers “going to supermarkets every weekend with my mother, only to see produce coming in from different countries. There would always be a small stall with locally grown produce in comparison to the larger ones for other countries, and I would question my mother as to why we didn’t grow any of our own food in Dubai.”

Through her undergraduate degree, Dhwani had the opportunity to perform research on this topic and learn of Dubai’s lack of arable land and freshwater sources. With the Agritecture team supporting her with their urban agricultural expertise, she created “a virtual and physical community food resource hub for all things controlled environment agriculture (CEA) in Dubai, providing both educational and entrepreneurial resources for Dubai’s residents to learn about CEA, and to put it into practice.”

She furthered this interest by redesigning a community garden in Harlem, New York, for the non-profit organization, Harlem Grown. Fighting through the numerous challenges of designing an experiential educational experience for toddlers and preschoolers, Dhwani envisioned a “bee-themed community garden with an in-house beehive that children can interact with, a planter bottle wall that enables children to grow their own individual plants to track the growth of, color-coded hexagonal planters that added life to the garden, birdhouses that enabled interaction with other species, and an activity zone where children could take what they grow, cook it, paint with it, eat it, and more!”

Whilst interning at Agritecture as the ‘Marketing & Communications Intern’, Dhwani continued to draw attention to and celebrate food systems resilience. And, shortly after completing her undergraduate degree, she joined the team full-time as the Junior Designer.

Agritecture’s Junior Designer

Dhwani manages Agritecture's online presence to raise awareness and educate readers on the importance of sustainable urban agriculture for developing smarter and more resilient cities. “It became obvious to me very early on that much of Agritecture’s global audience relies on our blog not only for their weekly industry updates, but also for truthful information.” Thinking about Agritecture’s reach with a 150,000+ total global audience spanning all the way from Southeast Asia to North America, Dhwani adds that “given how much greenwashing exists in this industry, I appreciate having control over the type of content we publish.”

Prior to joining the team, “I too was an avid reader of Agritecture’s blog; it fills me with great pride to be able to stand on the other side of the table and write these posts. Because of this, I’m always on the lookout for the next topic that will captivate our global audience.”

Alongside supporting marketing initiatives on social media, through the blog and newsletter, and on the website, Dhwani also spearheads the team’s branding and design efforts for client and internal projects. As a designer by training, “I enjoy being able to contribute to the tone and aesthetic for this growing industry, and support it in a meaningful way. This includes supporting entrepreneurs in actualizing their urban farming dreams. Because of this, Agritecture Designer is my favorite project by far! I’m often brought in to mockup software pages and graphics.” 

Fun fact: Dhwani helped lead the design of Agritecture’s swag! 

Dhwani’s Hopes For The Future Of CEA

The CEA sector is heating up fast and is expected to grow 5x over the next 10 years. In this rapidly changing environment, Dhwani believes that “sustainability should be at the root of every conversation.” Because of this, she specifies that she’d love to see:

1. More reporting and transparency in data throughout the industry to better tackle climate change. With increasing participation from greenhouse, indoor vertical, and tunnel house growers, the 2021 Global CEA Census is looking to help urban farms do precisely this.

2. Continued innovation and out-of-the-box thinking in the CEA space as it relates to energy efficiency, resource usage, and more. Similarly to the Census, Agritecture Designer will soon be launching tools to support entrepreneurs in assessing their sustainability metrics.

3. More cities taking the initiative to transform food systems by putting urban agriculture on the agenda.

As the new Junior Designer, Dhwani hopes to keep connecting with like-minded sustainability enthusiasts and changemakers that can help drive sustainable food production and out-of-the-box strategizing.

FURTHER READING

The Buzz Around Urban Agriculture

We Interviewed Equilibrium’s CEO About Their New $1 Billion CEA Fund. Here’s What He Had To Say.

This Architect Modeled An Inspiring Solution For Self-Sufficient Floating Communities