Food from the empire

Abstract

Among the several events that have shaped UK’s present , the British colonial empire could be one of the most significant ones. With the North Sea as Britains new passage to the world the British thalassocracy created one of the biggest colonial empires that lasted over three centuries. At its colonial peak, the imperial empire had occupied 24% of the Earth’s land area with 23% of the world’s population . Trade and exploitation of resources in the new colonies became the understructure of this empire. While UK’s proximity to the North Sea on the global scale facilitated the exchange of food and raw materials on the local scale it encouraged the growth of a complex system of internalised waterways and ports providing a lot of trade opportunities for the mercantile traders. During this time, food trade linked its colonies and the metropolis via complex bilateral and multilateral shipping routes of the North Sea, laying the foundation for the development of some of UK’s biggest cities today - London, Bristol,Manchester, Liverpool etc. Food therefore, was not just an adjunct to the British imperial might but fundamental to it .

At the core of the colonial expansion was the concept of land appropriation that encouraged new forms of landuses . This act of reappropriating land was happening simultaneously at two scales - the global scale, where land in the colonies was being utilised to produce food products and raw materials, and on the domestic scale where land was being reappropriated to introduce new forms of industrial typologies. Within the city privately owned land was progressively sold or rented out to speculative house builders and merchants to build small scale mills factories , while on the other hand the small scattered strips of agricultural land in the rural were being enclosed and privatised to introduce large scale manufacturing industries. Over the years this gradual appropriation of rural land has led to its depopulation and has facilitated the decline of the small farmers, leaving valuable arable land in the hands of private owners.

Today, the decline of the small farms and the progressive privatisation of rural land has led to a severe lack of occupational and living diversity and has also dispossessed the rural of its means of agricultural sustenance . Large number of privatised rural farms in UK have shifted to commercial or animal based farms forcing the outsourcing of its increasing food demands to its former colonies. Currently 43% of the total food consumed by UK is imported by 2050, with a population of 75 million this number is predicted to go up by another 20%.

This project therefore focuses on food production within the UK, using two main aspects - the North sea :as its territorial frame of reference and the British colonial empire :as its backdrop . Together both these factors were crucial in developing a design proposal that explores both, the possibility of food sufficiency in a post Brexit future and speculative strategies to reimagine the rural as the new productive territory . Since food is a natural derivative of productive land, land becomes a key element of the project narrative. By overlaying new systems of production, occupation and habitat the project tries to both, establish new relationships between natural and man-made systems and also eschew the traditional distinctions between the city and the rural. Using a systematic sprawl the design tries to highlight the flexibility of a decentralised city to be able to accommodate and respond to future uncertainties without compromising on the sustainable and efficient utilisation of land.

By establishing new forms of ownership and occupation the design also becomes a tool to decolonize the rural land of its industrial remnants to make way for new forms of infrastructure and logistics . In this new city, the land is no longer a commodity, it is a mode of sustenance that is equally accessible to every citizen living in it. By internalizing the systems of production and distribution within this city the project tries to contest North sea’s current role as a facilitator of an unequitable decentralised global trade. The end result does not claim to be a definitive solution to the impending food crisis, rather it is a test of whether the revival and appropriation of one of the most archaic systems of land ownership and profit will be able to diminish the perilous consequences of years of consumerism that was a direct result of colonial industrialisation.