{"id":748550,"date":"2024-07-24T08:49:47","date_gmt":"2024-07-24T07:49:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.architectsjournal.co.uk\/?p=748550"},"modified":"2024-11-14T15:19:18","modified_gmt":"2024-11-14T15:19:18","slug":"build-the-8000-mile-island-to-make-us-food-and-energy-self-sufficient","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.architectsjournal.co.uk\/news\/build-the-8000-mile-island-to-make-us-food-and-energy-self-sufficient","title":{"rendered":"Peter Barber: \u2018Build the 8,000-Mile Island to make us food and energy self-sufficient\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u00a0<\/span><\/b>My \u2018One Year, 365 Cities\u2019 project was an attempt to design a city a day for a year, resulting in numerous short experiments in urban form, unusual materials and imagined lifestyles. Among these ideas is \u2018100-Mile City\u2019, a project to encircle London with a new street-based linear city of factories, public buildings and two million houses. Another idea that emerged from the project is \u2018Village VK3\/C\u2019, a self-sufficient farming co-operative village in rural Wiltshire built out of earth from the ground on which it stands.<\/p>\n

Most recently I\u2019ve been thinking about an idea, still brewing and not yet fully formed, called \u20188,000-Mile Island\u2019. The idea encompasses the notion of a countrywide aquacultural and maritime industrial revolution that would see a ribbon of tidal barrages, offshore wind farms, giant floating tidal turbines, and deep-sea fish and seaweed farms, tracing our coastline from the Orkney Islands to the Isle of Wight and back. Such a project would bring renewed prosperity to our decaying, depopulated coastal towns and cities. It also offers a vision of a food and energy self-sufficient UK and an end to the housing crisis.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/span>1<\/b>\u00a0<\/span>Could we be energy self-sufficient?<\/strong>
\nWe currently import half of our energy, most of it in the form of gas and oil from tin-pot dictators in the Middle East and from our friend in Russia. However, the UK is unrivalled in its potential for generating clean, green energy. It is the windiest country in Europe and it has the most powerful tides in the world (a giant 15m tidal range off the Welsh coast).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"

Orbital O2 tidal turbine, Orkney<\/p>\n\t

Source:Orbital Marine Power<\/p><\/div>\n

\u00a0<\/span>2\u00a0<\/b> Let\u2019s end the housing crisis once and for all.<\/strong>
\nIt\u2019s easy. Refurbish 400,000 empty Victorian and Edwardian terraced houses in the Midlands, in the North and in our coastal towns, as homes for these new industries\u2019 incoming workforce. Let\u2019s redeploy the million people needlessly employed in housing construction in the South East to the making of 8,000-Mile Island.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Garrick Street, Liverpool<\/p>\n\t

Source:Sebastian Remme\/Alamy<\/p><\/div>\n

\"\"

Rampion Offshore Wind Farm<\/p>\n\t

Source:Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

3 <\/b>\u00a0<\/span>The Rampion Offshore Wind Farm located off the south coast and visible from the beaches of Brighton and Hove currently generates energy for 350,000 homes. It cost \u00a31 billion to build. One hundred wind farms of a similar scale could satisfy the domestic energy requirements of the UK\u2019s 35 million homes. The cost of all these? \u00a3100 billion \u2013 or the same as HS2. Wind power currently satisfies 50 per cent of our domestic energy consumption. Let\u2019s finish the job.<\/span><\/p>\n

4<\/b><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>Could we become food self-sufficient?<\/strong>
\nOver half of our food is currently transported from overseas. Half of that comes from beyond the EU. The globalised food industry has the UK firmly in its grasp with its food-mile madness, collapsing biodiversity, small farmers displaced, pesticide run-off and deforestation. This global industry sweeps aside local, even national, interests for maximum profit and is blind to the climate crisis. Our land area is 95,000 square miles but our territorial waters are three times that. Imagine a revolution in maritime food production.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Oyster farm, Whitstable, Kent<\/p>\n\t

Source:Shutterstock<\/p><\/div>\n

Picture this …<\/h3>\n

Build one hundred 400MW offshore wind farms. Interlace them with thousands of floating tidal energy turbines out at sea. Construct enormous tidal lagoons in our estuaries. Put miniature community-run cottage-industry wave power machines on rocky outcrops and inlets in Cornwall, the Hebrides and Cumbria.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s intersperse these offshore energy industries with enormous seaweed farms. These are already under construction off the coast of Norfolk, North Yorkshire and in the South West \u2013 seaweed carbon sinks, Amazonian in scale, producing food, a source of energy and munching carbon as they go. Give us hundreds of coastal oyster beds, mussel farms, fish and lobster hatcheries, floating fish farms producing hundreds of thousands of tonnes of food and fish-shit fertiliser for supply to aquaponic farms.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Construct maritime research stations in a necklace around these islands. Link them to coastal universities, sharing knowledge of these nascent technologies and processes for the benefit of everyone. Imagine existing fishing fleets with their local knowledge, know-how and equipment co-opted into these burgeoning industries. Employ the infrastructure already existing in the UK\u2019s declining offshore oil and shipbuilding industries in Hull, Inverness and Clydeside and think of thousands of new jobs in tired old Blackpool, Margate, St Leonards, Southend-on Sea, Newhaven. Think of the housing industry redeployed away from the South East and charged with restoring hundreds of thousands of empty homes; whole streets and neighbourhoods currently abandoned, in decay, now buzzing with new life, activity and prosperity from the incoming workforce.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s think carefully about how nationalised industries might make the best of top-down strategic planning, organisation and funding by central government, combined with devolved management, bottom-up, employing local knowledge practically, usefully and efficiently. And let\u2019s think how the profits from these processes and nationally owned industries might be reinvested into a sovereign wealth fund for the benefit of each and every citizen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0My \u2018One Year, 365 Cities\u2019 project was an attempt to design a city a day for a year, resulting in numerous short experiments in urban form, unusual materials and imagined lifestyles. Among these ideas is \u2018100-Mile City\u2019, a project to encircle London with a new street-based linear city of factories, public buildings and two million …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":80745,"featured_media":748581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_oasis_is_in_workflow":0,"_oasis_original":0,"ep_exclude_from_search":false},"categories":[681],"tags":[100812,3462],"yoast_head":"\nPeter Barber: \u2018Build the 8,000-Mile Island to make us food and energy self-sufficient\u2019<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"In the latest in the AJ series Blueprints for Change, Peter Barber proposes a bold four-point plan to avert climate catastrophe, solve the national housing crisis and make the UK self-sufficient in food and energy\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" 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