Snapping off a leaf of crisp baby lettuce, entrepreneur Andrew Shearer can demonstrate how colored lights in a hydroponic cabinet boost nutrients or alter the flavors and colors of plants that can be grown in a restaurant kitchen.
Strawberries, peppers and tomatoes are the next crops for his start-up Farmshelf, which aims to cut food miles and waste by selling the automated systems to grow vegetables for commercial use, home kitchens and even mobile vans.
“Going the next step, changing the way the food supply system can work for the highly perishable items that often end up in the landfill,” Shearer, 27, said at the New Lab workspace at Brooklyn Navy Yard (BNYDC).
Photo: AFP
Farmshelf is one of 95 companies at New Lab in the former shipyard, home to firms such as Honeybee Robotics Spacecraft Mechanisms Corp, which makes arms for Mars rovers and mouse-sized robots, and Spacial, where one of its drone blimps hangs from the ceiling.
Cities around the world are looking to BNYDC for inspiration as they struggle to replace declining industrial jobs with well-paid alternatives while regenerating areas left vacant and neglected by dying industries.
Once a thriving center on New York City’s East River employing 70,000 people, Brooklyn’s waterfront fell into dereliction as the shipbuilding business shut down, BNYDC chief executive David Ehrenberg said.
Packs of feral dogs would chase prospective tenants away as efforts at a revamp got underway, he said.
Fifteen years later, the yard is home to 330 companies and employs 7,000 people in what has become a hip neighborhood dotted with housing projects and chic apartment buildings.
BNYDC partners with struggling local schools to get children interested in fields such as robotics and internships, or jobs with one of the cutting-edge companies, Ehrenberg said.
“If things work out well, other cities can end up where we’ve ended up,” he said.
Alongside entrepreneurs developing nanotechnology or designing kinetic furniture, other companies at BNYDC are creating hundreds of blue-collar jobs, which urban experts say is key to making communities economically resilient.
At Steiner Studios, where the hit HBO series Girls was filmed, more than half the employees work in jobs such as on-set carpenters or electricians.
Crye Precision LLC employs more than 200 people, many of whom sew specialized camouflage gear and bendable body armor.
To be resilient, “any city can’t be over-reliant on a single industry, whether that be Rotterdam and the port, New Orleans and petrochemicals, New York and finance,” said Michael Berkowitz, president of the 100 Resilient Cities program.
The Rockefeller Foundation-backed US$164 million program aims to help urban areas protect themselves from shocks.
“There’ no one magic bullet,” Berkowitz said.
For cities such as Glasgow, Scotland, once the world’s biggest shipbuilder, a challenge is making growth inclusive as it looks to fill the space left vacant by industry and find new ways to use existing manufacturing skills.
“We’re looking at the diversification of our economy. We’re too dependant on bashing metal, but those same engineering skills and links to universities are ones we can use again,” Glasgow chief resilience officer Duncan Booker said.
“We’re not going to get that mass employment again, but we can get lots of lots of clusters of smaller companies, and some of the larger manufacturing companies and utilities to take on people,” he said.
Repurposing a 305,000m2of space for entrepreneurs seeking solutions to flooding and climate change is an option being considered in New Orleans as the city tries to shift away from dependence on the petrochemical industry.
“For us, it’s also about transitioning our people from the oil economy to the blue and green economy of the future,” New Orleans Deputy Mayor and chief resilience officer Jeff Hebert said.
“The most important part for us is to make sure we are training the people of the city, not just kids ... but people who are currently unemployed or underemployed so they can take advantage of innovations in the new economy,” he said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
TRANSFORMATION: Taiwan is now home to the largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, thanks to the nation’s economic policies President Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) yesterday attended an event marking the opening of Google’s second hardware research and development (R&D) office in Taiwan, which was held at New Taipei City’s Banciao District (板橋). This signals Taiwan’s transformation into the world’s largest Google hardware research and development center outside of the US, validating the nation’s economic policy in the past eight years, she said. The “five plus two” innovative industries policy, “six core strategic industries” initiative and infrastructure projects have grown the national industry and established resilient supply chains that withstood the COVID-19 pandemic, Tsai said. Taiwan has improved investment conditions of the domestic economy
MAJOR BENEFICIARY: The company benefits from TSMC’s advanced packaging scarcity, given robust demand for Nvidia AI chips, analysts said ASE Technology Holding Co (ASE, 日月光投控), the world’s biggest chip packaging and testing service provider, yesterday said it is raising its equipment capital expenditure budget by 10 percent this year to expand leading-edge and advanced packing and testing capacity amid strong artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing chip demand. This is on top of the 40 to 50 percent annual increase in its capital spending budget to more than the US$1.7 billion to announced in February. About half of the equipment capital expenditure would be spent on leading-edge and advanced packaging and testing technology, the company said. ASE is considered by analysts