Facing up to the UK’s Food Crisis—A Design Exploration of the Self-Sufficient City for Resilience and Food Security

Abstract

The increasing population and the aggregation of people in dense urban pockets add to the pressures on already complex and volatile global systems (WFP in Global food crisis, 2022). Food supply systems need to adapt and be resilient to not only natural phenomena such as climate change or the post COVID-19 crisis, but also in resistance to socioeconomic and geopolitical disturbances. The dependency of urban populations on external food systems makes these populations vulnerable to systemic breakdowns. This research looks at the looming food shortage in the UK (Bancroft in UK is ‘sleepwalking’ towards food shortages, farmers warn | The Independent in 2022), authors investigate design strategies for creating a more sustainable agrarian urbanism, which includes three classic urban utopias: Frank Llyod Wright’s Broadacre City, Kisho Kurokawa’s Agricultural City and MVRDV’s Pig City. Three case studies provide ideas and notions of creating a self-sufficient city in the post-colonial era of the UK. The design hypothesis responds to the increasing pressure from population and consumption growth, and the decreasing farming land and food suppliers. The final resolved urban farming system is based on existing conditions such as waste flows and underused spaces, it adopts novel design strategies and interacts with different elements of self-sufficiency to generate a network of farms with highly dense, multi-level structures.