Transferring the Plastic Sea into the Sea: Environmental Opportunities for Floating Greenhouses in Almería (Spain)

To create new sustainable food production systems that are more efficient, occupying less land space, and closer to the cities, will be critical for global stability. Rapid urbanization, the way we distribute food, the carbon footprint it entails, and the fragility of global food security systems demonstrate that the way we understood food production might need to be redefined to find new balances with urbanization and food demand. This chapter aims to elucidate the advantages and disadvantages of the potential use of the sea as a new territory for producing food. It will be tested by transferring The Plastic Sea (Almeria´s greenhouses) into the sea. It will be considered which would be the potential technologies that might allow this hypothesis to be feasible, considering the environmental conditions. It is presented as an exploratory approach to technological innovation systems for sustainable food production and will be part of a larger project that will focus on creating a generic descriptive framework for a sustainable marine agricultural system. The sea as an agricultural territory could have significant consequences for urban living, and architects and urban designers would need to consider how to define new potential relationships with the marine environment.