About the case study

After the former St. Clair Village public housing site was demolished and sat vacant for years, this opened up a rare opportunity for large-scale urban agriculture in Pittsburgh. Farming at Hilltop Urban Farm comes with several challenges, and chief among them is wind. To design an effective windbreak system for Hilltop, Pasa connected the farm with Paul Hanes Patterson, a Penn State Professor Emeritus, who designed a multi-layered windbreak system that works with the site’s topography and constraints.

This case study was developed with support from the Richard King Mellon Foundation.