Rooftop greenhouses as ecosystems
Welcome to a lunch webinar where researcher Marie-Claude Dubois explores rooftop greenhouses as a possible approach to urban food production, highlighting both opportunities and challenges.
Date: 9 December 2025
Time: 12:00 - 13:00
Organiser: SLU Future Food
Location: Online
This presentation explores rooftop greenhouse technology as a frontier for urban food production. It presents benefits and limitations, guiding planners, engineers, urban farmers, and architects. Key issues include business strategies, produce distribution, cultivation methods, building structure, access, glazing and shading to avoid overheating and light pollution, as well as plant systems and protection. It also touches on social, sustainability, and urban planning aspects. The presentation offers a comprehensive overview of rooftop greenhouses and their role in reshaping urban landscapes.
Agriculture faces big challenges: rising urban populations, erratic weather patterns due to climate change and soil degradation. Current farming practices worsens environmental degradation, driving emissions, habitat loss, water contamination, and biodiversity decline. Urban agriculture may offer solutions to some of these challenges by repurposing city spaces, protecting natural areas, and supplying local food.
Rooftop greenhouses are especially promising in temperate and cold climates, extending vegetable production – tomatoes, salads, herbs, cucumbers – into winter. They enable water harvesting, use free sunlight to cover about half their lighting needs, and boost energy efficiency by reducing heating and cooling demand for both greenhouse and host building.
About the presenter
Marie-Claude Dubois is a researcher at Lund University but has also worked at SLU until recently, and has been engaged in sustainable architecture since 2001. With nearly 25 years of experience in research, teaching, and practice, her work spans energy-efficient buildings, building simulations, and, more recently, agritecture. Together with five other researchers from SLU, Marie-Claude participated in the Interdisciplinary Academy (IDA) at SLU in 2023–2024, where the group explored rooftop greenhouse technology from an interdisciplinary perspective.
More about the IDA project: Urban food production requires interdisciplinary collaboration
