What I've been thinking about recently are some of the other potential consequences of a shift in agriculture from traditional rural to controlled urban methods, particularly in terms of land use. It can be argued
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A large-scale shift to vertical farming, should it live up to expectations, could upset this balance in many ways. Farming is, to be blunt, not the sort of profession that makes a person rich. If agriculture starts moving away from farmers' fields into controlled environments, it might not take long to reach a tipping point where farms become valuable only for the land they're sitting on - perhaps sparking a land rush among developers jockeying for the best territory on which to put their empty suburbs. That, in turn, could bury any shot at suburban densification.
It wouldn't necessarily have to be that way, though. Ontario already has a provincially-protected Greenbelt and has made an attempt at conserving the environmentally-sensitive Oak Ridges Moraine, although admittedly the enforcement of that protection has been spotty at best considering 200,000 people already live within it. A sufficiently forward-looking government could buy up the land ahead of the developers, perhaps to set up a network of provincial parks and secure the land against the relentless pace of development. There's no reason other governments in other jurisdictions couldn't do similar things.
The plowing-under of nature is, regrettably, one of the things that did frequently appear in science fiction, and which has long since become science fact. If urban agriculture does lead to the contraction of rural farmland, if we move fast enough we may yet stand in the bulldozers' way.
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