One of the, if not the most outstanding rooftop in Antwerpen is PAKT. PAKT is a complex of old warehouses, somewhere between the heart of the city and the old military hospital (green quarter). The warehouses provide an office space for a variety of companies, but most importantly, on the rooftop an urban agriculture project is located.
PAKT was initiated by two brothers, Ismail and Yusuf Yaman and Stefan Bostoen. In 2006 they bought the warehouses and made the space available to start-ups, artists and musicians. After some years they started renovating the buildings after which they rented them out as office spaces to a mixture of 30 companies. By 2016, agrobiotechnologist Bram Stessel and community expert Adje Van Oekelen started an urban agriculture project on the roofs of PAKT.
Adje grew up on one of the first organic farms in Belgium, just outside Antwerp. Bram came to the farm to learn about organic farming, as he studied agro-biotechnology. After his studies Bram wanted to start his own farm in Tielrode, a village nearby Antwerp. He found himself not being able to afford farmland, a problem many young farmers face. By coincidence he met Yusuf, who happened to be from Tielrode as well. At that time Bram was working as a mailman. Yusuf saw the missed potential of Bram’s experience and ambitions and offered him and Adje the opportunity to start an urban agriculture project on the roof of PAKT. And that’s how it all started!
Yusuf hired Adje and Bram for the first year to design the roof and create it’s concept. Also, the owners invested in the construction of the roof. “The first three years we were struggling a bit, first we were hired by the owners, but before we knew it we were running a business. There weren’t many examples, we had to learn a lot by trial and error. We were just young enthusiasts that wanted to do something with urban agriculture. But for the public it was a success from the beginning. We attracted a lot of attention, we were doing events, photoshoots and so on. We almost didn’t have time to focus on urban farming, even though that was why we initially started the project.”
Currently, the rooftop works on a membership basis. There are 200 rooftop farmers from the neighbourhood that pay an average of 25 euros per month to be a member of the community. As a member, you get access to the roof, share in the harvest and can join courses offered by professional farmers that teach about urban gardening. Also, these professional farmers join Adje & Brams urban agriculture cooperative at PAKT to sell their organic vegetables (grown elsewhere than the roof) on the farmers market downstairs and to local restaurants. These two aspects don’t provide enough income for a self-sustaining business model. Therefore, right before the pandemic, Adje and Bram invested in a meeting space in the greenhouse on the roof. The idea was to offer professional memberships to companies that want to come together on a regular basis on an inspiring location. Due to COVID it wasn’t easy to attract members at first. But now, with the extra income of the professional memberships the rooftop farm reached a profitable businessmodel. In the meantime, they partnered with Kristof Morel, an artist who’s built a tiny house on one of the roofs. Kristof now runs the tiny house as a visitors center for all kind of events, and it’s also used as Adje and Brams office space. Since 3 years Adje and her colleagues started with consultancy work and urban landscape design to help other rooftop and urban farming initiators in Belgium and abroad. And this year a new colleague, Hannelore, took over the rooftop visits. These are all extra sources of income that create a sustainable growth path for the project on the long term.
To find a profitable business model wasn’t easy for the first years, despite all the effort and creativity of its initiators. Meanwhile the project does create a lot of value to the building, the community and the city of Antwerp as a whole. The value that these kind of projects offer to its surroundings is benefitting the common good, though it’s often hard to explain in monetary terms.
To get started they needed an engineer to calculate the possibilities on the roofs of the warehouses. The buildings were old, and were made of up of different construction materials. The first two engineers didn’t want to take the challenge. A third engineer took the job and found a more creative way of calculating, with the reasoning that on top of bearing walls and beams, more weight could be placed and on other areas on the roof a lighter structure could function. On these areas big plastic barrels are placed, which are normally used in the food industry. These barrels are filled with substrate in which the plants and vegetables grow. They function as a fence and to store water as well. “The most sustainable option is to collect water on the roof itself. On the recommendation of our engineers, we have been able to put barrels on top on of the bearing walls and beams that are collecting about 300 liters of rainwater each, which makes a total of 100.000 liter of rainwater that is collected on the roof. Another 100.000 liter is stored in a big basin underneath the terrace of the pizzeria downstairs. Our total water storage is 200.000 liter of rainwater, which is enough to help us through one month of summer drought.”
With the feedback of the engineer, also Bram started experimenting with different types of substrates. “Normally 30 cm of soil weighs 300 kilo/m2, that is too heavy for some parts of the roof. That’s why we got inspired by the technique of the Aztecs. We ferment hay to grow our vegetables for a season, after which we use the hay as a mulch layer on the bins, 30 cm of hay weighs only 30 kilo/m2. Another positive side is that it’s full of nutrition, we fertilize our soil every year using this technique.”
“Food production on a roof is very expensive and not quite efficient, compared to professional farming in the soil. Nevertheless, a rooftop farm or urban garden can help to reconnect citizens with the origins of their food. And there are so many other opportunities and activities that can be explored and developed in an urban agriculture project on a roof, such as greening the city, community building, education, tourism, art, events, … The challenge for me was to stick to the activities that I like most and that I’m good at and to invest time to find the right partnerships for all other activities.”