Garden cities of today:

The ‘Thanet Earth’ project in East Kent, is a vast greenhouse complex, the size of eighty football pitches.  The project proposes to be able to produce fifteen percent of the UK’s consumed salad vegetables, reduce carbon consumption on imported foods and provide over five hundred new jobs.   Therefore, the project could potentially be economically and ecologically beneficial.    

In 1902, Ebenezer Howard first published his idea of Garden cities; where country and town living would no longer be separate societies but combined into one suburban farming concept.  Howard’s intentions were for a mass cultural re-framing in the distinction between the horticultural and industrial worlds, however the theory was only implemented into two towns.  Is ‘Thanet earth’ a pioneering venture or just a modern adaptation of Howard’s utopian vision? Instead of bringing more country into town, as in Howard’s concept, the Thanet project could be accused of imposing industrial behaviours into the countryside, blotting the landscape with fields of glass.  The project is unlikely to be replicated, as there are few areas with the correct climate in the UK.  However, if it was to expand further natural growth could effectively be eradicated and replaced with more soilless growing complexes, in which plants grow from nutrient-enriched water.  As a result, is our horticultural production going to turn in a world of battery farmed Iceberg lettuces?