City Hall may have expressed its affections for “edible landscaping” and green-lit (or gotten out of the way of) several urban agriculture projects, but it would be especially cool if the visual impact of such positive changes eventually went vertical. Truly, while there already are “green walls” in the Lower Mainland (eg. Inspiration Furniture on West 6th, Semiahmoo Sky Garden in South Surrey), it would be a hell of a lot more awesome if we had walls that we could gather food from. In Los Angeles, for example (which, granted, has a longer, hotter growing cycle), there are dozens of food walls, some with more than 4,000 plants growing on them, everything from tomatoes and cucumbers to bell peppers, spinach, and leeks. It’s a smart use of space in tight urban environments, and if you compare the typical horizontal acreage to the vertical – eg. New York has 30 miles of roofs and thousands of miles of walls – it just makes sense to explore the possibilities.

The before-and-after photos above depict the green wall (via) that was just installed in Paris at the intersection of Montorgueil, Reaumur Sebastopol and the Great Boulevards. It contains 7,600 plants representing 237 individual species.