However, if you look at vertical farming as a series of low-rise greenhouse warehouses ringing a city, like a lightly stacked up Thanet Earth, then I think there's a strong case for them.
Cattle actually come close to this because they don't need sunlight to grow so you can have multi story feed fed cattle farms. However, it's still cheaper to use more land than to build multi story cattle farms.
I'd argue it'd only become tenable with high land costs. The cheaper energy is, the less sense vertical farming becomes since it makes the transport costs from far away, cheap-land areas even lower. If real-estate in and out of a city are roughly the same (no cheap pasture land!), then the farm can be more or less any location, that includes in a city. But for that to happen, would probably imply some kind of Judge Dredd continent swallowing city first.
The scenario for this would be if the green houses grew themselves... which isn't utterly unimaginable.
Consider a red-wood sized tree/vine that gave high-protein fruit. Perhaps it would use just a bit of human-built scaffolding.
Why?
While suburbia may offend you, replacing suburbia with hive-living wouldn't significantly increase the amount of arable land in use.
The places that have food shortages have them because of bad governance, which hive-living won't fix.
And you know this, how? Let me suggest that you probably overstate the costs of suburbia.
> And I think a characterization of "hive-living" doesn't nearly do justice to the cultural, social, and economic benefits of a vibrant city.
You're assuming that everyone values the things that you do in much the same way. That may be true of the other folks in your tribe, but extrapolating universality from that demonstrates my point.
As far as "hive" goes, it's apt. It's accurate and the connotations point out the other side of the claimed advantages.
> Be open-minded when calling for openmindedness.
I'm not calling for openmindedness. I'm pointing out cherry-picking, and a couple of other problems.
I don't care where other people choose to live. However, if they're going to argue that their choice is superior, I think that it's fair to see if their argument makes sense. What part of that do you disagree with?
Which reminds me - I'm certain that I'll see you make the same complaints when an urbanist commits my sins, right?
10 people can work together and use 10 plots of land more efficiently than 10 individuals using 1 plot of land each. We just don't have a land shortage to the point of making availability an issue.
Even modern feedlots only takes cattle after they've spent a while grazing and quality of the resulting meat has been criticized. Cattle that spent all of it's life indoors could plausibly have many more problems than one see for today's meat.