BY ZACH MORTICE
“Altitudes” reorients formerly disused ecologies for the production of local cash crops, organized vertically in the Selva Central region of Peru. Image courtesy Openfabric.
The coffee production industry is a ?global economy with a local ecology,? says Francesco Garofalo of the landscape architecture studio Openfabric. The studio has a plan for a coffee-producing region of Peru that would align local cultivation practices with global distribution networks. Openfabric?s ?Altitudes? plan steps back from coffee plantation monocultures to spread cash crop risk by encouraging production of a range of foodstuffs. The goal is to create more sustainable cycles of cultivation, production, and distribution.
The plan focuses on the Selva Central region of Peru, east of Lima, which straddles both the Andes and the Amazon River Basin. The local economy is intensely reliant on coffee production, but it?s a fragile and volatile market. Prices surge and plummet on a whim, vulnerable to small climatic shifts that can greatly affect yield. That makes life for the region?s coffee producers precarious. And lately, temperatures in Selva Central have been rising because of climate change, causing growers to move their fields uphill for cooler temperatures. This shift leaves lower elevations vacant. ?Downhill, it creates a new landscape which doesn?t respond anymore to the conditions [and] habitat needed for coffee,? says Garofalo. It?s a ?new buffer zone that needs t...