Living on the Edge by AA School

LIVING ON THE EDGE AA Housing and Urbanism

Architectural Association Housing and Urbanism 2021 - 2022 Lead by: Elena Pascolo

Students: Eduardo Carcavilla Hejia Guan Rashida Momoh Guang Ren Anindita Shrivastava Ishani Shah Liyi Tan Haobo Yan Weilin Zhi

Table of Contents Introduction 7 Existing Conditions 19 Haven Urbanism 41 Assembly 51 Typological Deviations 95 New Land Management Paradigms

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INTRODUCTION What Does It Mean to Live on the Edge?

1 7

WHAT DOES IT MEAN ON THE EDGE? Living conditions in peripheral coastal Fig 1.1:

Aerial view of the factory. Source: “The Making of Thamesmead.” n.d. Thamesmead Community Archive.

Fig 1.2:

Peripheral environments. Source: “The Making of Thamesmead.” n.d. Thamesmead Community Archive.

Fig 1.3:

Gym under road bridge. Source: “The Making of Thamesmead.” n.d. Thamesmead Community Archive.

The Town of Tomorrow The periphery area of metropolises, with their large open land and resources, has always been seen as the ‘Land of Opportunity’. Thamesmead, a typical periphery land of east London and used to be administered by the army as a part of the Woolwich Arsenal, witnessed a mass development in the 1960-70s. The scheme was undertaken by the Greater London Council (GLC) to provide new residential accommodations in response to the housing crisis caused by the rapid urban population growth after the war.

This modernism development scheme promised its residents a marina lifestyle, with abundant greenery and broad pavements connecting residents to schools and local amenities. All of these are framed in a striking concrete Fauvist building. The ambitious and experimental design of which led to it being praised as “the Town of Tomorrow”1.

1.“A Town for Tomorrow: Thamesmead’s Utopian History.” 2019. Huck Magazine. January 25, 2019.

Fig 1.4:

Concrete houses. Source: “The Making of Thamesmead.” n.d. Thamesmead Community Archive.

Fig 1.5:

The model of Southmere Towers. Source: “Southmere, Lesnes and Parkview Towers: Thamesmead.” n.d. Www.thamesmeadnow.org.uk. Accessed June 8, 2022.

Fig 1.6:

The natural environment in peripheral areas. Source: These Breathtaking Photos Show Thamesmead in a Whole New Light.” 2019. Londonist. October 14, 2019.

However, Thamesmead was forced to pause for many years as the construction costs came in higher than originally planned, and pieces of the design were left out from the original plans. And with the abolition of the GLC in 1986, Thamesmead suffered from serious management problems, such as poor traffic, rocketing crime rates and the public disappointment of unrealized promises of building a riverside shopping centre, a new railway station or a cross-Thames railway station. The dream of modernization of “the Town of Tomorrow” has died .

Fig 1.7:

The drawing of the Thames’ estuary. Drawing by Author, Haobo.

Quality rather than Quantity In London, the Thames Estuary, including the City Ribbon, Inner Estuary, South Essex Foreshore, North Kent Foreshore and the River Thames, forms the major and promising productive places with enormous potential. They bring significant economic growth and contribution to the development of the UK. However, over the past decades, most estuaries have not yet been able to deliver the same level of economic growth as the productive pockets like the Canary Wharf and the Thames Estuary’s ports. This has resulted in a huge gap in wealth and opportunity among some regions.

As a reaction, the Thamesmead Estuary Growth Commission proposed an ambitious investment plan and vision for 2050, which included providing 1.3 million new jobs, and adding at least one million new homes to the population2,showing the priority consideration of development in quantity.

2.Thamesmead Estuary 2050 Growth Commission. https://democracy.kent.gov.uk/documents/s85957/Item%2010%20-%20 Thames%20Estuary%20Commission%20-%20Annex%20A.pdf

Fig 1.8:

The never-built railway station for Thamesmead.Smith, John. 2020. Source: “DLR to Thamesmead: 2030 for Earliest Opening.” Murky Depths. October 1, 2020.

Alternatively, under the pressure of climate issues, instead of raising visions of quantity for the abstract ‘Opportunity Area’, it is necessary to read the periphery areas as a series of territorial conditions and rethink our ways of settlements and production. In the periphery territory, except for the beautiful open land, the citylevel infrastructures which are usually underneath and invisible, like the sewage lines, become key geographical elements as green berms above ground. High bridge roads and ground rail lines cut through green land, with conventionally planned residential neighbourhoods isolated as enclaves, without adequate supporting services.

The key concern of this design research is, rather than an urban expansion based on modernism masterplans focusing on quantity demands with codes and limits, how could we transform the present development model, as we are heading for a post-carbon age, to strategically fulfil the long-lasting but still a future vision of ‘Habitat’3, which see human settlements as a part within a geological, ecological and biological interrelated ecosystem, generating self-sufficient and sustainable lifestyles.

3.Dirk van den Heuvel, Janno Martens, Victor Munoz Sanz, Habitat: Ecology Thingking in Architecture, June 2020 nai010 publishers, P9

Fig 1.9:

Peaday’s management plans Source: Thamesmead 2050“StackPath.” n.d. June 8, 2022.‌

London’s new town: Development Based on Quantity

The 30-year regeneration plan for the development of the Thamesmead proposed by Peabody.

Fig 1.10:

Sea level rise. Drawing by Author, Haobo

Sea Level Rise

In the East of England, the sea levels are rising at a rate of 3.6 mm per year due to global warming, and coastal cities will be at significant risk. This image is based on the central climate data, showing the territorial changes when the sea levels rise by 3 meters and 6 meters in the Thames Estuary.

It can be read from the image that a great deal of lowlying land will be flooded, the coastline will change, and some archipelago-like uplands will remain above water. It demands a development model with a concern of settlemets within marshland and the potential retreat in the future.

Fig 1.11:

The drawing of haven urbanism. Drawing by Author, Guang.

Haven Urbanism

This design research proposes Haven Urbanism as a vision that focuses on strategically establishing a network of mutual supporting pivotal artefacts within a distributed and symbiotic system, by exploring possible assemblages of new programmes in generating selfsufficiency. Sensitive to the environment and flexible to geographical conditions, the Pivotal Artefacts of new programmes would also function within the network of existing

natural and artificial infrastructures, thus rebuilding the relations between people and production, and between people and nature. This across-over networking of pivotal artefacts also suggests and demands the treasuring of natural lands, new ways of land management and stakeholders structure, and furthermore, new possibilities of social patterns of cooperation and collective living in the future of Habitat.

EXISTING CONDITIONS Defining a condition: Patchwork Periphery The Neighbourhood Unit Peripheral Corridors Heterogeneous Patches

2 19

Why Haven Urbanism? Defining a condition: Patchwork Periphery Living on the Edge Faced with rapid urbanisation and growth, and threatened by climate change, the urban fringe is placed in a precarious situation. It is, therefore, necessary to rethink development models in an attempt to address the new challenges. Fig 2.1:

Thamesmead in 1970s,Form website wallpaper.

Fig 2.2:

Thamesmead’s photo-A, by Author.

Fig 2.3:

Thamesmead’s photo-B, by Author.

Fig 2.4:

Children playing at Southmere Lake, From website architectsjournal.

Today’s rapid urbanisation has caused all sorts of problems. More and more residents are flocking to cities, but cities are lagging and are unable to respond quickly to the challenges of the new times. Conflict ensues when cities are unable to cope in time with excess population numbers and increasingly diverse population types. With resources and population concentrated in metropolitan centres, metropolises are generally faced with issues of population pressure, traffic congestion, historic preservation and urban regeneration. While attention is focused on the metropolitan city centre, the urban fringe becomes a neglected grey area.

Fig 2.5:

Thamesmead’s photo-C, by Author.

Thamesmead - the Town of Tomorrow Thamesmead is an area of south-east London, England, straddling the border between the Royal Borough of Greenwich and the London Borough of Bexley.

Fig 2.6:

Thamesmead’s photo-D, by Author.

Fig 2.7:

Thamesmead’s photo-E, by Author.

Thamesmead is located in south-east London and was once home to low-income working families after the Second World War. Modern developments were undertaken in the 1960s to address the housing problems of the time, but the scheme caused further social problems due to a lack of basic services and a lack of privacy in the housing stock. But after a gradual reduction in social crime and a spontaneous act of transformation of the community by its residents, Thamesmead gradually regained its reputation. What’s more, it has very extensive natural green spaces and hydrological conditions, as well as a lot of historical and popular cultural background. The Thamesmead area is therefore ideally suited as a testing ground for thinking about ways of living on the urban fringe.

Neutelings Patchwork Metropolis. The city can be understood as a patchwork of heterogeneity. In Patchwork metropolis, Neutling, referring to Randstad, writes: “There is not society, but an amalgamation of changing lifestyles, cultures, images, There is not society, but an amalgamation of changing lifestyles, cultures, images, market relations and spheres of influence, where any trendsetting avant-garde is lost in a cacophony of ideologies.”

Fig 2.8:

Willem Jan Neutelings. Patchwork metropolis in The Hague and Rotterdam region, 1990. From website TotalSpace

Fig 2.9:

Patchwork metropolis , From book, Willem Jan Neutelings architect.

Fig 2.10:

Book Cover , From book, Willem Jan Neutelings architect.

Fig 2.11:

Patchwork metropolis 1989-2014-A , by Jan Neutelings

Fig 2.12:

Patchwork metropolis 1989-2014-B , by Jan Neutelings

In 1989, the young Dutch architect Jan Neutelings developed a project for the area in between Rotterdam and The Hague that was going to face in the next years a huge increment of population and activities. This part of the Dutch territory is located in between two urban areas but, on the same time, it is located in the middle of another construction know as the Randstad. In this context he proposed his personal reinterpretation called tapijtmetropool or “carpet metropolis”. The Neutelings project appeared as a fresh answer to the Dutch urban problems. Using just two sketched maps (Figure 2.11-2.12) Jan Neutelings was able to propose a complete new interpretation of the Randstad.1 Figure2.11 represent the territory in betwee the Hague and Rotterdam as a series of black urban figures on top of a white background, highlighting the conceptual simplification behind the common way to interpret the urban condition.2 Figure1.2 reconsiders the same area through a critical reinterpretation. This part of the Randstad is shown as a continuous carpet reaching from the North sea to the Nieuwe Maas river. Each pat1 Pisano, Carlo. ”THE PATCHWORK METROPOLIS, 1989‐2014.” Facoltà di Ingegneria e Architettura University of Cagliari, via Marengo 2, Cagliari (CA). 2014, November. 2 Pisano, Carlo. “THE PATCHWORK METROPOLIS.” 2014.

tern represents a place with a specific programme and a specific physical structure. The conception at the base of this model is that within this heterogeneous field the contradiction between the city and landscape is abolished. There is only a series of cultivated patterns.3 3 Ibid.

Neighbourhood Unit The neighbourhood unit, or neighbourhood unit concept (NUC), is a residential design model, credited to Clarence A. Perry, for a neighbourhood population of about 5,000– 9,000 residents, with school, places of worship, and recreational areas at its centre. Commercial uses were relegated to the perimeter of the neighbourhood along arterial streets which defined the boundaries of the neighbourhood.

Pedestrians were able to move freely along interior curvilinear streets without interference from high-speed vehicular traffic. The model, utilizing curvilinear streets, accentuated a break with the traditional neighbourhood grid-pattern street system of the early 1900s. Through his model, Perry hoped to encourage social interaction and cohesion among residents living in the defined neighbourhood.4

Fig 2.13:

the Neighbourhood Unit, by Clarence A. Perry.

Perry advocated planning a self-governing unit centred on a primary school with just a little bit of everyday needs inside. When reading his seminal text, several points pop up which, unfortunately, are still very prevalent in current planning practice almost a hundred years later. But he argued that family patterns, schooling patterns and shopping patterns were set in stone at the time, and that the neighbourhood model did not take a developmental view of the settlement patterns of modern society. Perry assumed that in the future everything of importance would be concentrated in the city centre and that there would be no significant urban change in terms of metropolitan development and land use dispersal. It cuts residential areas with roads, leaving them in a fragmented form. In this unrealistic context, Perry tries to address the needs of pedestrians and to keep his communities completely disconnected from each other and from the city in which they are located. 5

4 Lerman, “The Neighborhood Unit – A Concept that Should Be Laid to Rest, ” 25 June 2015, https://yoavlerman.com/2015/06/25/the-neighborhood-unit-a-concept-that-should-be-laid-to-rest/. 5 Ibid.

The Current Neighbourhood. The neighbourhood has developed into this as a result of previous ideas around the neighbourhood model. The neighbourhood model arranged a single project area around a neighbourhood institution, with specific ideas about the arrangement of streets and which projects were located on the edge of the neighbourhood units. It creates an enclave that does not take into account how the various patches can interact with each other.

Fig 2.14:

The Current Neighbourhood by Author “Anindita Shrivastava”.

SECTION 04: Assembly Redefining Civic Center

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead arum fuga. Nis qui am conecus tiores as seque velibust untis experum acepudis dus enihiliquae vent in rem eaquiandit exceaquunt od quia nobit

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead arum fuga. Nis qui am conecus tiores as seque velibust untis experum acepudis dus enihiliquae vent in rem eaquiandit exceaquunt od quia nobit

Peripheral Corridors

26 26

Large infrastructural corridors have allowed cities to expand into peripheral lands. As these corridors intertwine with peri-urban patches, they produce distinct conditions that must be analyzed to shift how peripheral lands are managed.

Fig 2.15:

Peripheral Corridors, by Author “Rashida”.

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead

27 27

Peripheral Green Infrastructure Fig 2.16:

Peripheral Green Infrastructure, by Author “Rashida Momoh”.

Along the Thames Estuary green infrastructure provides corridors for non-human species, green amenities for local communities, and protection from possible flooding

Fenced Green Space Some green infrastructure has become privatized and fenced off, leaving little for public use.

Fig 2.17:

Current photo of Thamesmead-A, by Author.

Fig 2.18:

Current photo of Thamesmead-B, by Author.

Fig 2.19:

Current photo of Thamesmead-C, by Author.

Green Corridor meeting the Thames River In this image, the green infrastructure at the edge of the Thames River can be seen to have multiple, distinct functions, either operating as a comfortable amenity for the community, or as a location for industrial logistics.

Recognizing Nonhuman habitats

Squared

Vehicular Mobility Infrastructure Fig 2.20:

Vehicular Mobility Infrastructure, by Author “Rashida Momoh”.

Mobility infrastructure has typically been a primary factor in situating developments in both city centres and peripheral locations. This is due to connectivity increasingly being intertwined into our lives since the end of WWII. Although these networks support connecting various urban areas, logistical processes, economic and social networks, this type of infrastructure is monofuctional and disruptive to the landscape, both spatially and environmentally.

Multi-Level Mobility Infrastructure Mobility infrastructure contains a series of element deployed to address varying conditions along their expansive reach. Ramps and overpasses create a dual level transport condition allowing for unobstructed axial movement in multiple directions.

Fig 2.21:

Current photo of Thamesmead-D, by Author.

Fig 2.22:

Current photo of Thamesmead-E, by Author.

Fig 2.23:

Current photo of Thamesmead-F, by Author.

Underutilized Zones The areas on either side of mobility infrastructure tend to be underutilized green spaces that filer noise and air pollution from the highway to the residential areas.

Rail Infrastructure Rail infrastructure operates in a similar way to highway and road infrastructure in the ways that they disrupt peri-urban fabrics and leave underutilized land on either side.

Squared

Thames River Fig 2.24:

Thames River conditions, by Author “Rashida Momoh”.

The Thames River has often been considered a dividing element within London, rather than a single structuring element in a wider reading of territory. Due to sea level rise, the river with expand further into the land, so its conditions should be analyzed to understand how our relationship to waterways can be improved and sustained.

Thames River Edge Often at the edge of the Thames is a mud zone and a series of piers.

Fig 2.25:

Current photo of Thamesmead-G, by Author.

Fig 2.26:

Current photo of Thamesmead-H, by Author.

Fig 2.27:

Current photo of Thamesmead-I, by Author.

Thames as a logistics corridor The Thames has several industrial sites along its edge, therefore, it could be re-qualified as a logistical corridor supporting manufacturing processing for the city and peripheral lands.

River’s edge Although there are places to walk along the river’s edge, they area landscaped and unpleasant spaces to inhabit.

SECTION 04: Assembly Redefining Civic Center

Subtitle in semibold colour In the patchwork periphery, Neutlings examine the city as a series of heterogeneous patches which blur the stark contrast between landscape and urban areas. Moreover, the new programmatic combinations, we could start to think about redefining civic support centres.

Heterogeneous Patches

34 34

In the patchwork periphery, Neutlings examines the city as a series of heterogeneous patches which blur the stark contrast between landscape and urban areas. Moreover, the new programmatic combinations, we could start to think about redefining civic support centres.

Fig 2.28:

Heterogeneous Patches, by Author “Rashida Momoh”.

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead

Fig 01:

Plan of Thamesmead

35 35

Squared

Medium density patches Fig 2.29:

Medium density patches, by Author “Rashida Momoh”.

These areas contain the closest characteristics to dense urban living within the periphery. They contain more connections to mobility infrastructure and a generally rectilinear morphology. As seen in the diagram, they are further away from the Thames River than industrial areas, and suburban patches.

Fig 2.30:

Current photo of Thamesmead-J, by Author.

Various Typologies These patches contain varied typologies from terraced housing to modernist social housing towers.

Fig 2.31:

Current photo of Thamesmead-K, by Author.

Fig 2.32:

Current photo of Thamesmead-L, by Author.

Modernist Housing In the 1960s and 70s, peripheral lands were seen as residential areas of the future, allowing people to escape the density of the city center. Podiums were created to separate pedestrian paths from vehicular movement.

Residential Neighbourhoods Within the homogeneous residential patches, small green spaces offer localized park and recreation spaces.

Squared

Industrial Lands Fig 2.33:

Industrial Lands, by Author “Rashida Momoh”.

Peripheral lands are often used as the dumping grounds for industrial processes that are too large to fit within the city’s dense urban fabric. In the case of London’s east peripheral sites, the industrial lands grow larger as you move east along the Thames which make this area crucial to supporting the city center.

Industry and Dwellings Although peripheral lands contain these large industrial buildings the photo depicts how they are often isolated from where people live because they are considered noisy, smelly, and unsightly.

Fig 2.34:

Current photo of Thamesmead-M, by Author.

Fig 2.35:

Current photo of Thamesmead-N, by Author.

Fig 2.36:

Current photo of Thamesmead-O, by Author.

Deep Plan Typologies Most logistics facilities are in large, deep plan typologies such as shed warehouses. Although they are able to provide the efficiency needed for manufacturing processes, they occupy large swaths of land for mono-functional purposes.

Non-Human Habitats Deep plan typologies that house logistics are often isolated from the rest of the peripheral fabric, producing nondescript spaces used by non-human species.

HAVEN URBANISM Localizing and augmenting critical support services Infrastructural Urbanism Archipelagos Defining an Ambition: Cross-Scalar + Sectoral

‘Haven’ Urbanism 41

Fig 3.1:

Utopian vision for Autonomy by Cliff Harper inspired by Radical Technology (1977)

Fig 3.2:

Autonomous Terrace, Radical Technology (1976)

Fig 3.3:

Collectivised Garden, Radical Technology (1976)

Localizing and augmenting critical support services Utopian Vision inspired by Radical Technology Illustrator: Clifford Harper Year: 1976-77 In this transitional age, the present model of largescale industrialization and global trade with its long logistics chain becomes vulnerable. The Utopian vision by Cliff Harper in the 1977 raised model of modern rural settlement with local community based supporting system which is driven by the fuel crisis.1

While in 2020s, with the overlap of pandemic and climate change issues a model of mutual supporting resilient community can enable the possibility of autonomous urban units that challenge the idea of the neighbourhood towards transitional systems that are more adaptive and prepared to sea level rise. Both models are the transforming towards a self sufficient model which is localized based and ecological symbiotic and it is achieved through a series of critical supporting services, like wasting recycling, food supply, health work and domestic domains.

1 Adam Greenfield’s Speedbird. 2022. Antecedents of the minimum viable utopia: Cliff Harper’s “Visions” series https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/antecedents-of-theminimum-viable-utopia-cliff-harpers-visions-series/

Fig 3.4:

Self Sufficient City, Xiong’an China; Vicente Guallart (a vision driven by pandemic, climate crisis and low-carbon targets.

Fig 3.5:

Post-lockdown self-sufficient urban block.

Fig 3.6:

Food grown in green-houses.

Self-sufficient City Architects: Guallart Architects Location: Xiong’an China Year: 1976-77 This project designed by Guallart Architects, proposes autonomous block units that accomodate housing, critical support services, makers-space, energy production systems and green houses for food provision.2

2 Designboom, , Guallart architects proposes ‘self-sufficient city’ in china for a post-COVID era (Architecture & Design magazine, 2022) https://www.designboom.com/architecture/guallart-architects-self-sufficient-city-housing-post-covid-08-11-2020/

“Our proposal stems from the need to provide solutions to the various crises that are taking place in our planet at the same time, in order to create a new urban life, based on the circular bioeconomy, that will empower cities and communities.” -Vicente Guallart

A fragmented patchwork can be rethought through the ideas of an Infrastructure Urbanism and architecture’s ‘powerful instrumentality’. Stan Allen explained that infrastructure urbanism works at the large scale that escapes suspect notions of masterplanning. Allen quotes Walter Benjamin explaining that he ‘articulates the capacity of certain structures to act as scaffold for a complex series of events not anticipated by the architect-meaning and effects existing outside of the control of a single author that continuously evolve over time’.

The anticipatory role of infrastructure is not only highlighted by Stan Allen, Cedric Price sought the potential of an architecture that accepts that ‘it may not turn out to provide the best possible solution, and is therefore concerned with reactions, not merely initial appetites. His project ‘Ducklands’ for Hamburg city, proposed a proto-retreat strategy to allow nature retake its place and controlling predatory urban development. The strategies proposed in this text for infrastructure urbanism, contain this anticipatory feature, two exemplars are shown to illustrate its adaptation power.

Fig 3.7:

Two of the ‘cards’ used by Stan Allen ‘s practice to represent the project LAZ. The design of specific elements to be used by multiple authors, instead of a big masterplan is the strategy proposed to develop a suburban area.

Fig 3.8:

Topographic, productive and infrastructure operations used by Structures of Coastal Resilience team for a coastal area under the threat of inundation.

Infrastructure Urbanism

Logistical Activities Zone

Fingers of High Ground

Architects: Stan Allen Architects Location: Barcelona, 1999 This project developed by Allen’s pratice explores the ideas of infrastructure urbanism developed by the author through seven points in the book Points + Lines (1999). In it, infrastructure urbanism is described as an urban design that is less interested in the given and constructs the site itself, preparing the ground for the future- anticipation.- by being flexible and open to change, recognising the collective nature of the city and allowing the participation of multiple authors and actors. They accomodate contingency while maintaining overall continuity. LAZ project is represented through a series of instructions, a user manual that instead of defining a final design, proposes specific repeated elements to articulate flows and resources on a site.3

Architects: Anuradha and da Cunha Location: Norfolk, Virginia. Fingers of high ground project reads a topographic condition of the territory and uses it as a typologic solution that can be repeated and adapted. Highways and warehouses are used to accumulate water while the ground is used as an attenuation device that enhances ecologic flourishing and at the same time controls the tidal variation.4 It is anticipatory and infrastructural since more than its specific design, it proposes a strategy of inhabitation. As Allen would describe it, an atificial ecology that manages flows of energy on a site. The Thames Estuary allocates a patchwork of industrial areas, infrastructural elements and green surfaces that could work together to mitigate flood and enhance the flourishing of precarious areas.

3 Stan Allen, Points and Lines, (Princeton Architecture Press, 1999).

4 Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha. Desinging the coast in the Moment of Rain. in Infrastructure Space. ed. Andreas Ruby and Ilka Ruby.(Berlin: Ruby Press 2017) 345-360

Fig 3.9:

Melun Senart’s open void and archipelago system

Fig 3.10:

The archipelago of islands represented bydifferent textures as they are heterogeneous; with a mixture of functions in the open-void.

Archipelagos Melun Senart Architects: OMA Location: Paris, France Year: 1987

In the proposal for Melun Senart, OMA wrote, “we arrived at a figure of void spaces that we would protect from the contamination by the city – a new controlling element that would give the city, which was obviously not a classical city, but maybe a contemporary city, a form of coherence, of aesthetic pleasure and conviction.”5 Through this logic of a reverse approach, OMA was able to conceive of a new way of structuring peripheral lands through a focus of protecting the greenspace. Both Land Mosaics and Melun Senart allow us to think about how we can rethink how peripheral sites are structured. 5 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, (The Monacelli Press, Inc., America, 1995), 983.

“We conceptualize the settlement as an island, a finite entity whose politics can affect a larger context, well beyond its limited scale. Transcending the consolidated dialectic of local vs global, small vs big, top-down vs bottom-up, the settlement as island can be interpreted as a strategic platform for practices of autonomy and self - organization driven by local practices of commoning instead of exploitation.” -Pier Vittorio Aureli and Maria S.Giudici (Islands; The Settlement from Property to Care in Log47)

Fig 3.11:

New trends in Development Models; Strategies for Make, Food, Waste and Health

Defining an Ambition: Cross-Scalar and Sectoral By using the notion of Haven and Habitat instead of functionalism, it calls for a new form of living that is more geological, ecological and biological related Rather than a physical layout of functional buildings. This notion draws our attention to relocate human activities as part of the ecological loops, and transform our development model from the existing resourceconsuming model towards fully recycling and selfsufficient processes. with this ambition, it demands a framework that cross scalar and sectoral.

Nowadays, it is evident how the trends have transformed the landscape of architecture and urbanism. These trends shape the future. This research recognises how transformative these aims are in the sectors like, food, waste, health and maker-lands. These ambitions could have cross-overs between all the possible dimension of the evolving trends.

Fig 3.12:

Patchwork and Haven-Urbanism

Haven Urbanism Haven urbanism is to show a new development model which is based on a future vision of how we may live collectively in the future, in a post carbon age. We use the notion of ‘haven’ to replace the notion of ‘1920s neighbourhood unit’ to describe a new pattern of collective living as ‘habitat’. Habitat is a notion that was raised in the 1950s to show an opposite attitude to functional ideas. Rather than a physical layout of functional buildings, it calls for a new form of living that is more geological, ecological and biological related. This notion draws our attention to relocate human activities as part of the ecological loops, and transform our development model towards fully recycling and self-surfficient processes.

This transformation calls for both systematic and institutional shifts. It aims to generate a more ecosensitive method that is not only about the physical space layout, but more about how to reform the processes and organizations and involve multiple participators as interrelated parts of a ‘larger whole’ and contribute to forming a mutual supporting ‘autonomous archipelagos’. And it may lead to new form of neighbouhood as havens and lead to the redefinition of our lifestyles in the future. Moreover, this new way of development introduces ‘havens’ as fliters, sink, conduit and armatures which define autonomous archipelagos. These conditions are further shaped with typological, morphological and programmatic derivations.

We explore this transform model of ‘Haven urbanism’ thorough the propose of a series of new programmes and artifacts as supporting facilities in its neighbouhood, so as a reflection and reaction to the issues of climate change, sea-level rise, ecology-crisis, sustainability of energy, housing, food, and production supply, aiming at helping us survive in this transitional world.

‘Haven’ Urbanism

Fig 3.13:

Havens representing ‘conditions’ which leads to Haven Urbanism

The haven urbanism in Thamesmead highlights different ‘conditions’ like, acting as a filter with the help og greenhouses, vertical farming, checker board collective spaces, industry 4.0 in the industrial voids, interstitial augmented landscapes and maker spaces connected by the existing infrastructures. These havens identify conditions and attempt to create an artefact which works as a support system.

ASSEMBLY Studies in Assemblages of Support

PIXEL FARMING The Exemplars Fig 4.1.1-4.1.2:

SOA Architects, La Fabrique Agricole.

Fig 4.1.3-4.1.4:

Effekt

Architects, Regen Villages.

Fabrique Agricole

Regen Villages

Architects: SOA Architects Location: Floraindre, Paris Year: 2014

Architects: Effekt Architects Location: Almere, The Netherlands Year: 2016

Pixel farming is a new image of modern agriculture to feed everybody on this overcrowded planet and minimize its natural harm from Droevendaal Organic Experimental and Training Farm in Wageningen. Our food chain is now dominated by monoculture and largescale cultivation, which cause countless global problems like thawing permafrost, disappearing insects, eutrophic waterways, hungry farmers, corporate agribusiness bullies, simultaneous obesity and famine. Industrialscale agriculture is the most ecologically problematic. So, we need to reimagine our food production methods. Besides enough food, we can also produce other things like clean water, carbon storage, biodiversity, pest and disease control, and beautiful landscapes all by promoting species diversity on the farmland. Pixel farming is a diverse community of plants, which achieves ecological balances, feedback loops and plant interactions.

can work as patches and be inserted into communities and neighbourhoods. Pixel lands can be localized and provide fresh and various food for regionalized citizens, which gives the wasted and abandoned city edge new land value and economic effect. My imagination of the new life on the edge is pixel farming communities.

Pixel farming can not only be a more advanced edition than industrial food factories, but also a new chance for the hopeless suburb and metropolis periphery. It divides large-scale mechanical farmland into small pieces and colourful landscape carpets, which means that they can work as patches and periphery. It divides large-scale mechanical farmland into small pieces and colourful landscape carpets, which means that they

Pixel farming community is also an urban agricultural and self-sufficient habitat to develop local material recycling, collective capital sharing, and a circular economy. The aim is to build a productive, comfortable, and eco-friendly habitat which can be a social cohesion and a beautiful urban scene. It can provide better living conditions for citizens, reduce the conflicts between human factors and non-human factors in the modern city, and guarantee food safety. This is also urbanism about local food production, small-scale and environmentfriendly industrial agriculture, de-globalization and city sustainable development.

Fig 4.1.5:

Future City growing direction: from Thamesmead to East

Fig 4.1.6:

Programme and ground floor typology

Fig 4.1.7:

Community as a Bio-X linking the nearby human and non-human factors

PIXEL FARMING SYSTEM Fig 4.1.8:

Pixel Farming System

For pixel farming’s smooth operation, a reasonable technological system is necessary. There are seven pieces of farmland and each one has a support room that contains agricultural machines, chemistry nutrients, a controlling room and temporary storage. All the crops are transferred through the road to the selling centre. A training centre is a place for technology and knowledge taught, a womb to nurture new pixel farmers, who used to be local residents.

THE COMMUNITY CENTRE Fig 4.1.9:

The Community Centre

The community centre contributes to the city life reconstruction. This is an open block system for human activities and natural factors like sunlight, air, plants and water. Three squares around the building welcome every resident from every direction and provide outside fields. The load columns are all vertical food production. Open typology lets sunlight, fresh air and green come inside. The Garden landscape spreads to the ground floor. The roof is a translucent film system to collect rainwater.

AXONOMETRIC VIEW Fig 4.1.10:

Axonometric view of the pixel farming communities

Most of the service platforms are on the ground floor cooperating with pixel farmlands, creating a comfortable and interesting walking experience. Residents live on upper floors and enjoy plenty of sunlight and excellent city landscape scenes. The new discovery of the land value on the periphery opens a time when we reconsider our attitude to the earth and neighbours nearby.

FARMING COMMUNITIES The effect of new communities will not be restricted in itself, but feedback its surrounding residents and drive new city evolution. Their relationships with the city show various kinds of value in the public realm, collective life and ecology. The ground floor is the most potential and active area, which can even represent the spirit and soul of the community and corporate with the urban fabric.

Fig 4.1.11:

Pixel farming communities in the city context

FAMILY TOWER PLANS The right form of the high-rise for families can be a vertical village made of sloped roof houses. Each unit is for an entire family with a big balcony or living-dining room. Six or seven families live on the same level sharing two traffic cores. There are also collective platforms for neighbour interactions and outdoor activities. Residents can sit here and enjoy indoor green, surrounded by beautiful periphery scenes.

Fig 4.1.12: Plan of Thamesmead

DOMESTIC DOMAINS The Exemplars

Fig 4.1.13:

Collective Housing 110 Rooms

Fig 4.1.14:

Communal Villa

Collective Housing 110 Rooms

Communal Villa

Architects: MAIO Location: Barcelona, Spain, Year: 2013 – 2016 Built

Architects: Dogma | Pier Aureli and Martino Tattara Location: Berlin, Germany Year: 2015

The project, located in Barcelona’s Eixample, wanted to learn from and upgrade the traditional house typology. The plan of the typology is therefore formalised according to an equal (or almost equal) distribution of rooms, a traditional feature of the area’s late-nineteenth-century residential areas. This feature allows the occupants of these flats to change their use according to their needs.

Communal Villa is a model for the provision of collective housing designed by Dogma (Pier Vittorio Aureli & Martino Tattara) for around 50 artists. The overall concept focuses on a realistic housing model for those artists who choose to live and work together. The designers argue that new forms of production nowadays mean that work and life overlap to the extent that they become indistinguishable. Knowing from past experience that the work that mixes life and work is primarily that of the artist, the overall architectural design revolves around the framework of the artist’s new way of life.3

Starting from this type of condition, the building was designed as a system of 110 rooms that could be used as required. Each flat has the possibility of being enlarged or reduced in size, adding or reducing rooms to meet the future needs of its inhabitants. 1 With 20 rooms per floor, each floor is initially divided into 4 flats with 5 rooms each, the rooms are connected so that no corridors are needed. A small kitchen was placed in the middle as the centre, while the other rooms could be used as bedrooms, living rooms, etc. Irregular distribution of spaces is used on the ground floor, where various shapes are arranged for different purposes. The whole draw people in an open gesture, allowing people to understand the entrance hall as an extension of the street.2

1 Coulleri, Agustina.”Collective Housing 110 Rooms / MAIO.” Published on 13th September 2021. https://www.archdaily.com/968030/collective-housing-110-rooms-maio. 2 Coulleri.”Collective Housing.”

In the proposal for the communal villas, the designers challenge this view of the home by proposing a generic space, thus transcending the distinction between life and work. Each villa includes both individual spaces (bunk boxes) and collective spaces (studios, workshops, kitchens, saunas, sound rooms, nurseries, etc.). This organisation aims to maximise the collective space and minimise the individual space, allowing the latter to become a real refuge while encouraging tenants to live in the collective space.

Dogma (Architectural office), Communal villa : production and reproduction in art-

ists’ housing / Dogma + Realism Working Group. Leipzig : Spector Books, 2017.

Fig 4.1.15:

Doughnuts Domestic Domains Study

Fig 4.1.16:

Chessboard Structure Neighborhood Form

Fig 4.1.17:

Chessboard Structure Neighborhood Functional Area Simulation

LIVING ON THE EDGE Fig 4.1.18:

Southmere lake Neighborhood conditions.

Sparsely populated urban fringe areas need a large number of residents to activate the whole area, bringing income and jobs, and where necessary, communities need to help facilitate cooperatives or foundations to help residents pay their rent and other expenses, so that low-income people can live and work in the urban fringe.

CHESSBOARD STRUCTURE NEIGHBORHOOD Fig 4.1.19:

Axonometric view of the Chessboard Structure Community.

The chessboard structure allows for specific modalities to be defined, making it suitable for marginal areas with different infrastructural conditions. And it is possible to combine specific functions of the grid at will to produce different effects according to the needs of the local population. Modal design is a powerful answer to low carbon and economic cities, its low cost and diverse possibilities are ideally suited to work on the urban fringe, sharing the pressure of over-urbanisation with metropolitan areas.

WORK AND LIFE Fig 4.1.20:

Comprehensive office and residential building floor plan analysis.

The mixed-use building within the community is primarily residential and office, and consists of three parts, a central public activity area, and residential areas on either side. The central area is the atrium public activity area, with 8 studios on floors 1-8, which can be rented out to small companies as offices or to artists as studios.

DESIGN VISION In terms of design approach, a rich spatial design is adopted to provide a variety of public spaces of different functions and scales for residents of different ages, classes and cultural backgrounds, and attention needs to be paid to the integration of indoor areas with outdoor areas to meet the challenges of Post-Pandemic; also, more sunlight and air are brought into the building, and more environmentally friendly materials are adopted, such as wooden structures, which are more conducive to environmental protection.

Fig 4.1.21:

Chessboard Structure in Southmere lake Neighborhood

A VIBRANT COMMUNITY Enriching the function and form of the buildings, maintaining the quality of the green spaces and actively bringing in sunlight; but at the same time taking care to keep the neighbourhood open, without walls separating the settlement from the street, and providing enough space for activities to keep the neighbourhood open to the outside, can effectively prevent the neighbourhood from becoming bogged down in life and keep it vibrant.

Fig 4.1.22:

Chessboard Structure Community life as shown in the Section.

DIVERSE COMMON SPACES The living area is flanked by the residential area, which has several different combinations to suit the needs of young singles, families of two or more, with different families sharing the large living area, which can be used for cooking, relaxing and, for families with children, having the option of placing play equipment in the large living area. Public spaces of varying degrees of privacy and scale are available to meet the diverse needs of residents.

Fig 4.1.23:

Comprehensive office and residential building floor plan analysis.

CIVIC SUPPORT HUB IN AN AUGMENTED LANDSCAPE The Exemplars

Fig 4.1.24:

Public Condensor by Muoto Architects; the exemplar shows the variety of programs accomodates by employing an openplan

Fig 4.1.25:

Architecture school by Lacaton and Vassal Open-plan employing flexibility and adaptability.

Public Condensor

Architecture school

Architects: Muoto Architects Location: France Year: 2016

Architects: Lacaton and Vassal Location: France Year: 2009

The first exemplar of Public Condenser by Muoto Architects is a mixed-used building with indoor and outdoor facilities like a restaurant, sports area and parking areas for deliveries.10 This linear facility has a central core which enables vertical circulation through the staircase. Moreover, this public condenser also employs an open plan by shifting the horizontal circulatory spaces to the periphery of the artefact. The open plan in this case is seen as an exemplar of mixing several activities and facilities to enable interaction, transparency and openness through the built fabric. Principles like the use of vertical and horizontal circulation create a fair outlined open plan so that, the plan becomes liberated from the circulatory spaces and then this open plan could be employed to fit in the mixedused facilities and services. This research extrapolates the principles of circulation and linearity which leads to a fairly successful open-plan with this exemplar.

landscape. The pivotal artefact creates civic support for the haven and the existing plug-in schools bring new possibilities for programmatic amalgamations. Moreover, the pivotal artefact supports the schools by providing new spaces for children for their afterschool activities, teachers; the meeting and conference spaces. With the provision of support services to the neighbourhood, this artefact also provides emergency services like a vaccination centre, spaces required in epidemic/pandemic for treatment of patients and also storage facilities. Thus, the artefact becomes pivotal in terms of its programmatic amalgamations.

The open plan is also composed of a variety of spaces such as transitions, circulatory areas, layers of different volumes and key support services. Such composition becomes essentially the essence of an open plan. The variation, continuity and linearity of the open plan bring a sense of connectivity to the augmented landscapes. This civic support hub in the haven survives with the help of hydrology which creates shifts in ground datum. Therefore this becomes “embedded” in this augmented

Moreover, the open plan also works with the consideration of new combinations of mixed-used facilities which are seen in the exemplar of Architecture School by Lacaton Vassal. Here, the design is such that, the plan could be adapted for reconversions and new interventions. The double and triple-height volumes allow new interactions vertically. This also allows the possibility for new extensions for future use. This research has extrapolated the careful consideration of the intermediate spaces which are left for events or future extensions from this exemplar. Furthermore, these in-between spaces become free from any functions which makes these spots new meeting and event spaces. The range of events and meeting spots could be captured from this exemplar.

Fig 4.1.26:

Programmatic amalgamations facilitated by the open-plan.

Fig 4.1.27:

Transitions, circulatory spaces and other inerchangable functions interlocked together in an open-plan.

Fig 4.1.28:

An open-plan with functions like, co-working spaces, emergency services; an ‘interchanging’ brief.

HEALTH SANCTUARY The Exemplars

Fig 4.1.29:

Steno Diabetes Centre, the current healthcare programmatic trends

Fig 4.1.30:

The Urban Village, the interiority and programmatic structure

Steno Diabetes Centre

The Urban Village

Architects: Vilhelm Lauritzen & Mikkelsen Architects Location: Copenhagen Year: 2016

Architects: Effekt, Space 10 Location: Worldwide Year: 2018

The investigation of Steno Diabetes Centre is the strategic system to understand the plan-metric spatial system of the artefact. The exemplar is a porous mat building that is getting the outdoor green infrastructure indoors, creating a well-stitched environment stimulating healing. Treatment and diagnostic rooms were placed around six courtyards; the rooms were interspaced by waiting rooms, eatery units, libraries, and research units. The layout of the consultation and treatment rooms was clean with a proper work desk system for consultation, diagnosis chair, and sink slab for research and keeping samples. The courtyards were defined as squares of various activities like food lab and café, nutrition square, knowledge square, and fitness square. The ceiling and floors had slatted wood as the building material for synthesising a natural environment, where the outside vegetation imparts colour and vivaciousness.4

The first strategy for designing the threshold spaces was understood by investigating the urban village project by Effekt. The model fabricated different housing units for singles, couples, and families with varied spatial typologies. The housing units are stitched together by green public spaces, private spaces, and common utilitarian areas. The primary focus of the design was not curating housing units rather, these plugged-in ‘plus’ spaces acting as flexible intermediatory spaces like farms, shared living rooms and kitchens, media rooms, co-working and event spaces. The large volumetric spaces functioned as platforms for interaction and community development.5

The mat and porous building comprises various consultation rooms and activity rooms. The rooms are accessed through stripped corridors along the green courtyards. In Steno diabetes centre, this spatial quality is shifted, where threshold spaces and corridors are single-loaded and have massive glass façades viewing the outside lush green courtyards.

4 Santos, Sabrina. 2017. “Gallery Of This Copenhagen Diabetes Center Connects Patients To Nature - 8”. Archdaily. https://www.archdaily.com

“Urban Village Project”. 2018. Effekt. https:// www.effekt.dk/urbanvillage.

Fig 4.1.31:

The programmatic structure of the Sanctuary

Fig 4.1.32:

The programmatic structure of the artefact

Fig 4.1.33:

The Stakeholder Structure of the artefact

PARTICIPATORY RECYCLING FACILITIES The Exemplars

Fig 4.1.34:

The Growing Pavilion

Fig 4.1.35:

R-Urban Project

The Growing Pavillion

R-Urban - RececLab

It is a temporary events space at Dutch Design Week, Mycelium cultivated from plants and trees or agricultural wastes made into outer panels for buildings. Resources play a critical role in developing cities and support a city’s operation. Nowadays, the linear waste metabolism needs to be transformed into the ideal circular model in the city, creating a circular economy network and increasing the city’s resilience6.

Architects: Constantine Petcou，Doina Location: Colombes and Paris Year: 2020

How can cities achieve such an ideal model for managing their resources? In the central of the city, the convenience of public facilities and the highly supportive residents allow recycling facilities to develop into a local waste recycling network on a big scale. But what about the rural areas of the city? How should the circular economy be set there when the periphery faces the contrasting surroundings, the limited public facilities and residents’ poor environmental awareness? This project explores a new paradigm through the analysis of RecycLab, a civic recycling facility, and mycologist Peter McCoy’s theory that mycelium can decompose waste for recycling facilities to generate a strong circular economy network in the periphery. And the new paradigm of recycling infrastructure can prompt the periphery to form part of the more comprehensive network of London’s circular economy.

6 “Designing the City of Tomorrow (2017).” n.d. William McDonough. Accessed June 6, 2022. https://mcdonough.com/writings/designing-city-tomorrow-2017/.

R-URBAN is a strategy of urban resilience in European cities involving the creation of a network of locally closed ecological cycles linking a series of fields of urban activities. In the part of recycling, RececLab, which is an citizen and grassroots participation’s recycling infrastructure, and this project also formed a strong circular economy network in the local area by encouraging self-sufficiency among residents and strengthening cooperation between stakeholders. Self-sufficiency strengthens residents awareness of recycling This project expanded the residents’ participation in ecological activities by the ways of self-sufficiency. That means residents were allowed to receive the benefits from recycling in a short term, as well as encouraged to raise their environmental protection awareness, which helped to acquire support from inhabitants for the recycling network construction. The project was complemented by two other projects, one is a new type of urban farming (AgroCité and AnimaLab) that collects rainwater, solar energy for energy and aquaponics. The other is a community housing unit (EcoHab) that combined housing and ecological farming, with the intention of creating a self-sufficient and sustainable area in an urban context. A new type of urban life was constructed by making it possible for the inhabitants to achieve the selfsufficiency of the agrarian societies that used to exist.

Fig 4.1.36:

The wastes can be used as food for the mycelium, thus growing the mushrooms.

Fig 4.1.37: The Section

Exemplars BLOCK- Moriyama House Fig 4.1.38:

Moriyama House

Moriyama House was conceived as a space where different types of activities can co-exist. The white private boxes were shared spaces for these occupants to communicate. Both spatial types did not interfere with and supported each other. In addition, the opening design of the micro-social housing allowed a free circulation between the buildings’ interior and the exterior of the block by sharing the courtyard space. And the landscaping in the courtyard also served a restrictive duty to protect the enclosed private space.

SHED-Markthal Rotterdam, Fig 4.1.39:

MVRDV - Markthal

Markthal Rotterdam, the largest weekly open-air fresh food in Rotterdam. Markthal Rotterdam covered 96 retail units underneath through an arch-shaped flat, including fruit and vegetable stalls, restaurants and cafes, etc. These functionalities attracted the neighbourhood and thus strengthened the bonds among the communities. It is interesting to note that the project accommodated the multiplicity types of functional areas in terms of the void, opening, and volume and kept them within a systematic and structured framework to avoid confusion.

SYSTEM - Le Fresnoy Art Centr Fig 4.1.40:

Le Fresnoy Art Centre

The Le Fresnoy Art Centre provides a reference for convenient access to various types of people. That is an artistic complex was covered by a large roof, the under space including schools, film studios and other production studios. The “in-between” area between the former and the new roof was inserted as an industrial t-table as a transport system for visitors. In terms of function, it was designed to connect different components, which guarantees the circulation of the building’s interior and exterior, as well as the user’s quick access to their destination.

Typology‘s shift to respond to the new paradigm BLOCK The open block is a way for mycelial waste decomposition plants and reprocessing workshops to be located in the same place without interfering with each other. This provides space for industrial processing of waste. Reproduction and knowledge dissemination can be carried out, thus achieving the connection between the different stakeholders. The movement of people and the transport of goods are kept separate by landscaping. It means that the landscaping permits visitors to move freely through the public in-processing areas without interrupting the goods flow that is hidden by the landscape.

Fig 4.1.41: Block System

SHED Big shed maintained the different recycling activities within an integrated framework and kept their diversity and flexibility. At the same time, this form also owned the potential to generate a passive ventilation system approach, which provided natural ventilation to open public areas, therefore, reducing the building’s energy consumption.

Fig 4.1.42: Shed

SYSTEM The path system has the ability to help the new recycling paradigm to generate a reasonable traffic circulation. Pedestrians can move freely through the public space and can also reach individual areas via the catwalk. Goods are carried by an underground transport system to realize the products processed in the different departments. Trucks are set up next to the different processing departments to ease the transportation of the products in that workshop. This way of setting allows visitors, products and cars can operate inside at the same time without disturbing each other.

Fig 4.1.43: The path system

CIVIC SUPPORT HUB IN AN AUGMENTED LANDSCAPE The Exemplars

Fig 4.2.1:

Melun Senart; Open- void and archipelagos system

Melun Senart Architects: OMA Location: Paris, France Year: 1987 Fig 4.2.2:

Melun Senart; Composition of voids

Thamesmead could be seen as a series of interstitial voids or landscapes which have a pattern of being present in this complex carpet of heterogeneous patches. This could also draw parallels from the proposition of Melun Senart by OMA. Melun Senart was seen as a system of voids and archipelagos which are comprised of diverse functions and uses. As argued by OMA, the linear bands and the archipelagos could be developed independently from one another.1 As stated by OMA, “They will not be homogeneous”. This system of voids and archipelagos induces autonomy as they could be designed by different stakeholders and diverse architectural techniques. The dimension of heterogeneity is what binds the reading of the periphery by OMA, Neutelings and perhaps Thamesmead together. Moreover, these propositions indicate a diverse range of uses, functions, forms and techniques which ultimately brings out the whole carpet of the peripheral lands with syncretism.

1 Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, S, M, L, XL, (The Monacelli Press, Inc., America, 1995), 983.

Fig 4.2.3:

System of voids in Thamesmead

Fig 4.2.4:

Interstitial Landscapes of the haven; an inter-connected networked system

System of Interstitial Landscapes Fig 4.2.5:

Interstitial voids inter-connected by the corridors

The systems of interstitial landscapes are instrumental in obtaining the hidden potential of these landscapes. As they induce porosity and permeability, these interstitial voids act as an entity which is organically present in the peri-urban landscapes. Moreover, this research is an attempt to ‘remain’ in the precarious conditions, perhaps the interstitial landscapes could be employed and augmented in a way which unlocks new possibilities of morphological patterns and caters to the concept of ‘haven urbanism’.

Existing system Fig 4.2.6:

Existing system of residential neighbourhoods with the void system

The existing system is composed of the enclaved neighbourhoods, mobility infrastructure, schools and some midrise structures with row-houses and blank spaces sandwiched within a certain interval.

Augmented Landscapes Fig 4.2.7:

Interstitial Landscapes, and the topographical extrapolations

These sponges/voids/landscapes form a complex distributed and networked system which is organic as the existing elements are used to create new forms of morphology and reinforce the concept of ‘haven urbanism’. Furthermore, this haven gets into shape by taking into consideration the organic interstitial landscapes with existing schools and augmenting the landscape with the principles of water and sponge city.

Elaborating on the concept of providing civic support services in these interstitial landscapes, the starting point would be studying the existing organic system of these distributed landscapes. The pattern that emerges could be seen as scattered interstitial landscapes or voids surrounded by housing units and are further attached to the neighbourhood’s schools. Moreover, this neighbourhood’s schools act as plug-ins between two or more interstitial landscapes. The reason to have this pattern under consideration is, that the programme which was diagnostic till now could be transformed into a proposition.

The proposition is formed by the argument of ‘supporting’ the neighbourhood’s schools by giving pivotal artefacts of civic support with the help of the interstitial landscapes. Thus, the proposition now becomes a way to ‘situate’ critical support services and facilities for the existing schools into a neighbourhood; again, reinforcing the concept of ‘haven urbanism’. Diving further into how to ‘remain’ in these landscapes, one could start to ‘augment’ those concerning the precarious conditions of Thamesmead. For Thamesmead, flooding due to sealevel rise has always been a precarious condition which should be taken into consideration while evolving the morphological patterns of the haven.

Fig 4.2.8:

Augmented Landscape with civic support hub embedded

A HEALTH SACNTUARY The Exemplars

Fig 4.2.9:

Land Mosaics by Richard T.T. Foreman

Land Mosaic Fig 4.2.10: Patches

Fig 4.2.11: Corridors

Fig 4.2.12:

Movement spatial pattern

Fig 4.2.13:

Types of Landscape

The book by Richard T.T. Foreman studies conditions of environments pressured by rapid urbanization and sprawl. Through an understanding of the land-mosaic model, one can begin to read the condition of peripheral sites, which is that they tend to be dumping grounds for large infrastructure that the city cannot or does not want to hold including jails, sewage plants, and airports, and other large infrastructural and industrial elements. He provides a framework for reading the territory through the land mosaic model including patch, corridor, and matrix. Land mosaic is a pattern of patch, matrix, and corridor. 2 According to Richard T.T. Foreman, the matrix is the first homogeneous layer or background of land. A patch is a distinctive element in the matrix, and corridors are paths and connectors for movement through the patches and matrix. This establishes a relationship to the wider area and addresses the possibilities for human and non-human cohabitation.3 It also helps us in fabricating a study on how to utilize the landscape ecology of inter-digitated and checker board landscapes in the assemblages.Land mosaic is a land augmentation strategy for defining the land with further clarity.

2 Richard T.T Foreman, Land Mosaic (Cambridge University Press, 1995), 301. 3 Ibid., 302.

Fig 4.2.14:

Diverse Habitats

Fig 4.2.15:

The Greenfield site acting as an ecological filter for the sanctuary and the adjacent neighbourhood

The Haven Fig 4.2.16:

The augmented movement pattern and the new assemblage

The proposed strategy for Thamesmead utilised the concept of interdigitation to define the edge condition between the neighbourhood and the greenfield. The edge condition before has a movement pattern along the neighbourhood, creating a greenfield site as a disused patch. To insinuate the patch’s use the movement must change from along the patch to across the patch to impart an influx of people from a residential neighbourhood to a greenfield sanctuary.

Filter and Land Parcellations Fig 4.2.17:

Varied land Parcellations filtered by greenfield patch

The Greenfield site of Thamesmead, demands an ecological filter to purify the polluted air from the Sewage treatment plant situated adjacent to the haven. The greenfield haven consists of a large linear filter belt containing air filtering trees and patches of hydrological basins to filter water. The linear filter is interposed between the sewage treatment plant and the healthcare sanctuary. The linear corridor also serves as a community park for recreation and therapeutic activities.

The new landscape structure Fig 4.2.18:

The interdigitated and checkerboard landscape

The checkerboard concept was another landscape principle by Foreman for land management. The checkerboard is a repetitive pattern of squares. It helps create contrast between mosaic sequences for the land and helps formulate the Sanctuary’s complexity and functionality.

Fig 4.2.19: Iterations and study diagrams exploring spatial configuration

Fig 4.2.20: The morphological variation

Land mosaic is the strategy for defining the land with further clarity. Land mosaic is a pattern of patch, matrix, and corridor. According to Richard TT Foreman, the matrix is the first homogenous layer or background of land. A patch is a distinctive element in the matrix, and corridors are paths and connectors for movement through the patches and matrix. In the Sanctuary, identifying patches and matrices and creating corridors in the variable checkerboard pattern will produce meaningful morphology.

The overlapped comb like pattern and checkerboard rectangles were defined as a green matrix having ecological diversity. The remaining rectangular units were identified as patches for deploying the artefact. The threshold of the patches and matrix has ecotones defined as corridors. The corridors were movement patterns for the Sanctuary and embraced the ecotone by providing transitional greenhouses, pergolas, and open path structures

CROSS-OVERS: HUMMAN AND NON HUMAN INFRASTRUCTURE The Exemplars

Fig 4.2.21:

Ducklands proposal . “ Anticipating Fabulous Futures E-Flux Architecture - E-Flux” 2019 England (Perspective of Madeley Transfer Area). 1964–1966 | MoMA,” n.d.

Fig 4.2.22:

Potteries Thinkbelt. was Cedric Price’s critique of the traditional university system. “Cedric Price. Potteries Thinkbelt Project, Staffordshire, England (Perspective of Madeley Transfer Area). 1964–1966 | MoMA,” n.d.

Ducklands Proposal

Potteries Thinkbelt

Architect: Cedric Price Location: Hamburg Year: 1989-1991

Architect: Cedric Price Location: Sttafordshire Year: 1964-1966

The Ducklands proposal by Cedric Price in Hamburg also offers some ideas for future infrastructure development. In order to reactivate the Hamburg Docklands, Cedric Price Architects (CPA) proposed to make the development area disappear-literally. They point out that there should be no rush and that the land should be left open for a period so that we can anticipate what role we might need the land to play. Anticipatory urbanism is an infrastructure of support.4 It is necessary to leave these kinds of urban voids open in a city before we want to consolidate everything at once.

Potteries Thinkbelt is a new way of thinking about Cedric Price’s traditional infrastructure facilities5. He seeks to create a new style of infrastructure that combines a variety of service functions with traffic flows, etc., to create a new type of infrastructure to serve the public and, on this basis, to create a new model of regional development. It increases the flexibility of the space, allowing it to meet the needs of different scenarios and service users. Railbuses, meanwhile, combine transport with productive living and can be used as an extension of the production space when required, increasing the reception capacity of the whole system. Such an approach is very effective in the face of the diverse needs of Thamesmead.

4 “Anticipating Fabulous Futures - E-Flux Architecture E-Flux.” 2019. E-Flux.com. 2019. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/overgrowth/284918/anticipating-fabulous-futures/.

5 “THE THINKBELT: THE UNIVERSITY THAT NEVER WAS.” 2014. Discover Society. July 1, 2014. https://archive.discoversociety.org/2014/07/01/the-thinkbelt-theuniversity-that-never-was/.

Fig 4.2.23:

The basic condition of Thamesmead and the challenges facing the urban fringe. This diagram illustrates the two main threats to the urban fringe, urban land scarcity and habitat fragmentation, and shows the reduction of habitat in Thamesmead between 1945 and 2022.

Fig 4.2.24:

Analysis of animal species and crossing patterns

Fig 4.2.25:

Typologies of Cross-overs

As the main vehicle of the modern economy, cities are driving rapid economic development while also expanding outwards in response to the production and living needs of their inhabitants. As cities expand and suburban urbanisation takes place, residents and companies living and producing in the urban fringe are presented with a variety of challenges and opportunities. Among these, the shortage of land for construction and the habitats fragmentation due to urbanisation pressures are the most significant issues and challenges.

This research proposes strategies for Thamesmead based on Richard Forman’s Land Mosaics and an analysis of Cedric Priced’s Potteries Thinkbelt and Hamburg Docklands proposals. A new perspective is presented here, looking at the periphery in the context of two projects - architecture as a cantilever and architecture as a bridge. By creating a multifunctional eco-infrastructure corridor along the Thames, a multifunctional ecological articulation and system for humans and beyond. We rethink what it means to live on the edge.

Building as Bridge Fig 4.2.26:

Building as Bridge

Building as a bridge and Building as a multi-functional ecological infrastructure will help Thamesmead address the above issues and provide human and more-than-human services. Ecological infrastructure refers to the natural or semi-natural structural elements of ecosystems and landscapes that are important in delivering ecosystem services. The multifunctional ecological infrastructure is to attach multiple service functions to the ecological infrastructure so that it can simultaneously provide support to humans and more-than-human.

Building as Cantilever Fig 4.2.27:

Building as Cantilever Sectional explorations

Building as cantilever raised and hovering over green spaces and wetlands, combining the daily service functions of the infrastructure with the activities of the animals, creating a shared space where humans and animals can live together in harmony. The elevated base allows animals to move freely through the building and avoids becoming an obstacle to their migration. At the same time, the planting and water ponds at the bottom provide a suitable resting place for people.

Scenes: Human-animal Symbiosis Fig 4.2.28:

Building as Bridge: scenes of humananimal symbiosis

Building as bridge is located along the Ridgeway in Thamesmead and is an extension of the traditional infrastructural services and the crossing of animals. The building consists of different functional modules that combine to form the required functional space. The purpose of this design is that because Building as bridge is set in a built-up area, unlike Building as cantilever which is set in a wetland, certain restrictions must be placed on animal crossing in order to protect the safety of humans and animals.

Fig 4.2.29:

Building as Bridge

Fig 4.2.30:

Building as Bridge Sectional Explorations.

The flora and fauna of Thamesmead were analysed and categorised into terrestrial, aquatic and bird species, and different devices were provided in the design to assist the animals’ movement. The trees and vines provide a natural habitat for the animals as well as the people who work and reside in the structure. The greenery effectively purifies the indoor air and regulates the indoor temperature.

The main functions of this type of building are observation, exhibition and offices. The building is situated in a large wetland and green area, which provides excellent opportunities for the observation of flora and fauna. The top floor serves as a resting place for birds as well as a place for leisurely conversation. The large, airy glass windows ensure that the staff have an excellent view of the nature while they work.

MAKERLANDS The Exemplars

Fig 4.3.1:

CRCLR House

Fig 4.3.2:

Blackhorse Workshop

CRCLR House

Blackhorse Workshop Assemble

Architects: Hutten & Palaste Location: Berlin, Germany Year: 2016

Architects: Assemble Location: London, UK Year: 2014

Both CRCLR house and Blackhorse workshop city stakeholder to reconsider the relationships amongst networks in cities. The both consider how localized productivity can allow residents to access to maker spaces, workshops, recycling centers, material libraries, working spaces, and other functions that allow for a sense of collective support. In Infrastructural Space, Kathy Velikov and Geoffrey Thun write, “it is no longer possible to consider infrastructure as a compartmentalized and bounded system, manifest through the design and detailing of specific artifacts that are planned, constructed, and managed within silos of expertise and governance”.1 However, this is still widely the accepted line of thought, which is seen in the recent plans for Thamesmead. For Thamesmead’s Production Corridor proposed by GLA, combining living, working and recycling into the development strategy offers the ecological and social aspects missing in the government’s proposal. When coupled with physical infrastructure, these invisible networks have the ability to reveal themselves as crucial aspects to everyday life that can no longer be ignored if we are to face the housing and climate crises through architectural means.

needs of the city and the periphery. These types provide an efficiency in the manufacturing and industrialization process, but the ways their size, organization, and situation in the context is currently considered offers little to the communities or landscape they serve. Architects and urban designers can use linearity as a catalyst to repair peripheral conditions and establish a harmony amongst various factors.

One condition of peripheral sites is their tendency to contain large shared warehouse and deep plan typologies that house the manufacturing and industrial 1

Ruby and Ruby, Infrastructure Space.

In this approach, extension allows the linear typology to frame an edge on a slender site, while flexibility in its organization and site situation enable incremental adaptation to suit the needs of the various networks served. Combining infrastructure, extension, anticipation, and linearity grants makerlands to be thought of as megaforms. Megaforms provide cohesion and civic functions through their topographical qualities and horizontality that enable a marking of ground and continuation of the surrounding landscape. In the case of Thamesmead, it suffered a devastating flood in the 1950s , which lead to the development of a robust system of pathways from the north half of the area leading to Abbey Woods. Rather than constructing pathways through high energy methods, requalification of the ground through berms.

Fig 4.3.3:

Diagram of opportunity areas along mobility infrastructure

Fig 4.3.4:

2 diagrams of pivotal artefact

Fig 4.3.5:

Diagram showing the lack of permeability within Thamesmead

FLEXIBILITY THROUGH EXTENSION Fig 4.3.6:

One option for extension focused on framing an edge

Fig 4.3.7:

One option focused on thresholds on either side of mobility infrastructure

Fig 4.3.8:

One option utilising a stitching strategy

3 strategies are depicted that enable an incremental design process based on the collective needs around communal living, managing production services, and establishing access routes and maker yards. Figure 33 shows a low density approach focused on framing one edge of the transport infrastructure, providing a unity amongst the large residential plots.

URBAN STITCHING Fig 4.3.9: Site plan

Makerlands show how the positioning and use of grid can create new a series of spaces and connections. It considers how orientation can increase the permeability of an area, and this is explored further when existing secondary mobility infrastructure is used to produce morphological synergy on either side of the primary highway. In both instances, the use of a grid and structure is important to facilitating these new relationships.

TYPOLOGICAL VARIATIONS Fig 4.3.10:

Section across mobility

The chosen site contained various undulations in the ground on either side of the Eastern Way needed to accommodate the disruption brought by mobility infrastructure. These areas are unified through a layered approach based on need. A range of building sizes that accommodate different aspects of maker processes, collective living, and economic opportunities sit on either side to act as thresholds and also as forms of incremental infrastructure.

COLLECTIVE SUPPORT Fig 4.3.11: Perspective

Through resources such as teaching spaces, material libraries, and work spaces, the building becomes civic and creates resources for self-sufficiency.

MAKER PROCESSES This diagram details the maker process and how a process of making, storing, repairing, housing, and exchanging is facilitated by linear buildings.

Fig 4.3.12:

Makerland process diagram

LIFE OF THE MAKERLANDS This diagram shows the possible life of the building and shows how recycled steel could be used to structure the linear forms.

Fig 4.3.13: Section diagram

A HIGH STREET FARM The Exemplar

Fig 4.3.14:

Nest We Grow Project

Fig 4.3.15:

Student Housing

Nest We Grow

Student Housing

Architects: Kengo Kuma & Associates Location: Takinoue, Japan Year: 2014

Architects: C.F. Møller Architects Location: University of Southern Denmark, Denmark Year: 2012-2015

The project Nest we grow, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates and College of Environmental Design UC Berkeley, show as a case of a micro-unit of living and farming. Except for the life cycle of food, what is notable about this Nest is the spatial composition of the two systems. A tea platform is floating in the middle of the Nest. It is kept in the warm air created by the food envelope in winter while enjoying the breeze blows in summer. This composition brings dramatic extensions to the domestic spaces. It is a spatial intensification of both quantity and quality. Besides, the harvesting, cooking, storing, and composting activity spaces offer a chance for the community to gather together and enjoy group labour, learning, and sharing under diversified food themes according to different seasons. This Nest becomes a nature device that redefines the relationship between communities and between humans and nature.

extending productive armature, explore the possibility of urban agriculture as the driving power to enable a wide integration between urban-rural and humannature, thus generating self-sufficient and spontaneous components leading to habitat.

Besides, the student housing, located in Odense and designed by C.F. Møller Architects, suggests a way of integrating tower living by a shared void space which would serve as vertical circulation and a collective kitchen and living room.

By revaluating and transforming the existing spatial prototype of ‘towers + podium system’ in Thamesmead, ‘High street farm’, a vertical integration of tower living + vertical farming supported by a horizontally

Moreover, this new programme would not be isolated functional buildings but become a series of associationalism2 democracy as its social structure. The project Nest we grow, designed by Kengo Kuma & Associates and College of Environmental Design UC Berkeley, show as a case of a micro-unit of living and farming. Except for the life cycle of food, what is notable about this Nest is the spatial composition of the two systems. A tea platform is floating in the middle of the Nest. It is kept in the warm air created by the food envelope in winter while enjoying the breeze blows in summer. This composition brings dramatic extensions to the domestic spaces. It is a spatial intensification of both quantity and quality. Besides, the harvesting, cooking, storing, and composting activity spaces offer a chance for the community to gather together and enjoy group labour, learning, and sharing under diversified food themes according to different seasons. This Nest becomes a nature device that redefines the relationship between communities and between humans and nature. 2 Paul, Hirst. Associative Democracy. 1st ed. 2013. Reprint, Wiley, 2013. Chapter one & two. https://www.perlego.com/book/1535477/associative-democracy-pdf.

Fig 4.3.16: Plan of Thamesmead

Fig 4.3.17:

High street farm works in a larger network by integration of artifitial and natural infrastructural armatures.

URBAN AGRICULTURE Fig 4.3.18:

Urban Agriculture

As we are heading for a post-carbon age under the pressure of climate issues, the emerging discourses about sustainable agriculture urbanism articulate a scenario in which agriculture production would become an integral component in urban extension. It suggests that the hybrid of the “cities and agriculture” 3 will lead to new urban forms and production modes; blur the separations between urban and rural, and mix our way of work, life, leisure and agriculture. 3 Sébastien Marot. Taking the Country’s Side: Agriculture and Architecture. Lisbon: Lisbon Architecture Triennale; Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2019. P201 https://agriculture-architecture.net/compass

INTEGRATION Fig 4.3.19: Integration

Vertically, it’s an exploration of the integration of vertical farming and tower living on multiple scales. The interlocked dual space system of void (food) + solid (living) shows flexibility and enables the mutually beneficial symbiosis between the two systems, enabling micro recycling of water, waste, and heat. The food system could be conceptualized as void spaces. Thus, the potential spatial form of vertical farming and living could also be abstracted by a typology exploration and reassemblage of void space as thickened envelope, integrated void rooms, and sharing collective spaces.

TYPOLOGICAL VARIATION Fig 4.3.20:

Typological Variation

As the Nest we grow indicated, the envelope food system, which can also be interpreted as a greenhouse or winter garden, could be conceptualized as void spaces. In this way, the potential spatial form of vertical farming and living could also be abstracted by a typology exploration of integration and reassemblage. A series of exemplars discussing the solid + void relationships offers insight into this composition.

NUCLEI OF AGGREGATION As a middle layer, the lifted podiums form the main logistic axis, serving both the above intensified vertical farm+living and the ground floor mini-food-factories with a fractal layout opening to their surroundings, accommodating the multiprocess of food harvesting, storage, cooking, packaging, transporting and distributing.

Fig 4.3.21: Nuclei of Aggregation

NUCLEI OF AGGREGATION While horizontally, with the threedimensional crossing articulator, the extensional podium armature begins to link to a larger network of the artificial ecosystem across the periphery territory. Flows exchange with other supporting artefacts, working-out or sightseeing flows of people, food sharing market on the green berm enabled by the vertical farming, et cetera. Multi-participatory activities in the neighbourhoods would be absorbed, reintegrated and intensified. Unforeseeable activities would be provoked and supported by this network of infrastructural armatures.

Fig 4.3.22: Nuclei of Aggregation

TYPOLOGICAL VARIATION Size is the key characteristic that enables the void space to function as an extension of domestic space. When the void shares an imitated volume of space as a domestic room, its potential of achieving a domestic interior quality would be evoked, and positively generate varied extensions of domestic activities. By adding void/nature/food as rooms into this composition, it opened up new possibilities for domestic spatial qualities and activities.

Fig 4.3.23: Typological Variation

INFRASTRUCTURE GROUNDS The Exemplar

Fig 4.3.24-4.3.25:

Rebuild by Design: New Meadowlands

Fig 4.3.26-4.3.27: Rebuild by Design: HUD

Rebuild by Design: New Meadowland

Rebuild by Design: HUD

Architects: MIT CAU, ZUS, Urbanisten Location: The Meadowlands, New Jersey Year: 2014

Architects: OMA Location: Hoboken, New Jersey Year: 2014

Peripheries in coastal areas and their populations are increasingly threatened by flooding and the continued and accelerated sea level rise, affecting areas in precarious conditions. This represents an analogous conundrum: Does one remain or retreat from coastal areas? Henk Ovink explains that water is at the heart of an uncertain future produced by the Climate Change. Hurricane Sandy in 2012 exposed the vulnerability of coastal settlements in the Northeast of the United States and pushed the authorities to set a new institutional and design framework for the flourishing of coastal areas. (Ruby and Ruby 2017). The Rebuild by Design competition joined planners and architects with local authorities and communities to rethink inhabitation in coastal areas. New Meadowlands project -designed by MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN with Deltares; 75B; and Volker Infra Design- developed 3 main strategies. Protect, Connect and Grow. These were executed through the shaping of a system of berms and constructions, rezoning and contemplating the amalgamation of existent activities in the area. Focusing on ‘Protect’, the topographic operation consists in generating a water management infrastructure of higher and lower berms distributing water flows into freshwater basins and marshes, shaping new meadowlands, and integrating the existent ones. 4

HUD by OMA considers different design alternatives for the complexity of territorial conditions that a coastal area could contain. A first set of solutions to Resist, constructs a limit between water and land which permits different degrees of permeability. Terraced edges bulkheads and deployable walls are a first barrier against storm surge and rain-based flash flood. This solution provides less adaptability since more than an infrastructure ground, it is a close system that remains permanently. Nevertheless, the strategies used to Delay, represent a topographic intervention that instead of breaking land-water continuities, dissolve the limit into gradients. Parklands and terraced edges are a first approach to this boundary, while inland, - and following the inundation maps- bioswale paths help to reduce impermeable 9 surfaces and allow water to be absorbed. 5 Finally, store systems implantation through cisterns, bio retention basins and constructed wetlands, direct the water to infrastructural critical devices for future discharge. It pushes governments to act in coordination with communities and experts to develop a system of solutions that follows Allen’s duality presented previously: Infrastructures are precise but indeterminate at the same time. Anticipating the unforeseen.

4 Henk Ovink ‘Transformative Capacity of Resilience: Learning from rebuild by Design’ in Infrastruc-ture Space. ed. Andreas Ruby and Ilka Ruby.(Berlin: Ruby Press 2017) 337-44

Can we consider sheds, warehouses, factories and their processes as transitional structures for temporary remaining? 5 https://rebuildbydesign.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/673.pdf

Fig 4.3.28:

Study Plan of the Thames Estuary: Industrial Fabric in connection with Marshes and Meadowlands. Drawing by design team

Fig 4.3.29:

Study Plan of the Thames Estuary: Industrial Fabric in connection with Marshes and Meadowlands.

Fig 4.3.30:

Study Diagram. Terraced topography in parallel to the coast line. Explorations with topographic and ecologic continuity for tidal attenuation. A staged infrastructure ground strategy recognising event possibilities in between the warehouses.

INTERSTITIAL CORRIDORS FOR A NEW PERIPHERAL FABRIC Fig 4.3.31:

Typological experimentation of a productive armature using existing warehouses, and projecting new critical support services. Photograph by design team

Infrastructure Ground Strategies in Thamesmead proposes a territorial section that shapes interstitial corridors between the existent warehouses. The interstitial corridors can be used as berm and water flow guidelines, reconnecting the fragmented ecological patches that remain. This berm continuity could accommodate logistical corridors at ground level for the existent industries and the ones yet to be proposed, and simultaneously elevate critical services or space for events to happen and preparing the ground for the unforeseen.

TEMPORARY REMAINING Fig 4.3.32:

Study section for Infrastructure Grounds. Mounds continuity for logistic corridors and critical support services. Drawing by design team

Repetition can facilitate an architectural approach to urbanism: ‘detailed design of typical elements or repetitive structures’ allow a strategy of intervention from the particular to the general instead of the typical opposite process. Planning not by prohibition but by technical and instrumental limits. 6 Current warehouses 1:5000

6 Allen, Stan. (1999). Infrastructural Urbanism. In: S. Allen, ed., Points + Lines: Diagrams and Pro-jects for the City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press.

INFRASTRUCTURE GROUNDS Fig 4.3.33:

Productive Infrastructure Grounds

Infrastructural Grounds proposes as a model of productive self-sufficiency, using and connecting the existent sheds located in the industrial area of thamesmead as supporting elements for the construction of a CLT plant. The connection is proposed through a logistical corridor built to underpin the berm continuity

Protect: Berm containment infrastructure New Land management 1:5000

Conne Existen and Lo 1:5000

LINEAR TYPOLOGIES FOR CRITICAL SUPPORT SERVICES A linear armature that hosts this CLT factory could provide the precise elements for the construction over the Berms system, generating a temporal growth strategy to remain while retreat strategies are developed. This modular construction could be adapted for makers space, dwelling, locate critical services and monitoring the variations of tidal and ecosystems produced by climate change

Space in-be Basins as gr

EXISTING WAREHOUSES SUPPORTING A NEW PRODUCTION

Current warehouses 1:5000

It’s productive linearity facilitates enlargement by addition, and shrinking by subtraction: Adaptation. CLT is one of the processes that require an interconnected system nevertheless, they can be thought as the first stage of the retreat strategy, while their volumes could support in a second stage, supporting recreational areas connected to the marshlands and in a a third stage space for water accumulation.

Protect: Berm conta

Connect: Ecologies an

Growth: Transition t

LINEARITY ENHANCES ADAPTABILITY Infrastructural Ground utilise existent edification as supporting units that can be used for different purposes: large volumes enhances the possibility of holding minor elements but also to accommodate variations that are economically viable and easy to adapt.

Protect: Berm containment infrastructure New Land management 1:5000

Connect: Existent Warehouse, Urban Fabric and Logistics Corridors 1:5000

Growth: Transitio 1:5000

TYPOLOGICAL DERIVATIONS Long Linear Typologies Deep Plan Typologies

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LONG LINEAR TYPOLOGY Extendable and Flexible

Flexible and sensitive to environment Fig 5.1-5.2:

Habitat in the city. W.J. Neutelings, A. Wall, X. De Geyter and F. Roodbe.1990 https://socks-studio. com/2016/07/13/habitat-and-the-city-competition-entry-by-neutelings-wall-de-geyterand-roodbeen-1990/

Fig 5.3:

Typology diagram. Drawn by Author, Rashida Momoh.

Long linear plans enable the repetition of functional components, which are ensured light, wind, and views on both sides. Besides, this type benefits from its flexible assemblage between units and the capacity to extend and fold according to the condition of the environment.

In the project Habitat in the City, proposed by Willem Jan Neutlings in 1990, the organization of the plan is characterised by its possibility to repeat as an endless configuration. This project especially shows new possibilities by pushing service spaces to the perimeter and releasing the plan, thus gaining great flexibility in accommodating multiple programmes in parallel strips. The facade becomes functional and sensitive to the environment, making the services visible and generating new manners and lifestyles.

Similarly, the project Gifu Kitagata Apartment Building, designed by SANAA in 1994-2000, adopted the long linear modularity by achieving flexibility under a rigid disposition. The folding slim slabs with the ability of extension enables the building to adapt to the environment and propose a new order of the ground spaces. Differently, the perimeter space and several components are spared for public circulation and a series of sharing yards, characterized by the continuously single run stairs, forming the collective space system, generating a sense of belonging to the vertical community.

Fig 5.4-5.6:

Gifu Kitagata Apartment Building. Sanna. 1994-2000 http://architecture-history.org/architects/ architects/SEJIMA/OBJECTS/1994-2000,%20 Gifu%20Kitagata%20 Apartment%20Building,%20Gifu,%20Japan. html

Fig 5.7-5.8:

Typology diagram. Drawn by Author, Rashida Momoh.

LONG LINEAR TYPOLOGY Design exploration

Fig 5.9:

Critical support center. Drawn by Author, Ishani Shah.

Proposal of Critical Civic Center is an exploration of how to ‘remain’ in the precarious conditions of the low-lying flood-prone zone. Considering the organic interstitial landscapes with existing schools, the linear typology is adopted to strategically locate the artefacts according to the contours to augment the landscape with the principles of water and sponge city. This civic support hub survives with the help of hydrology which creates shifts in ground datum. Therefore it becomes “embedded” in this augmented landscape. The pivotal artefact creates civic support for the haven and the existing plug-in schools.

Moreover, the artefact supports the schools by providing new flexible spaces for children for their after-school activities, teachers, the meeting and conference spaces, emergency services like a vaccination centre, spaces required in epidemic/pandemic for treatment of patients and also storage facilities. Thus, the artefact becomes pivotal in terms of its flexibility enabled by the linear space typology.

Proposal of a Makerlands is explored to fix the linear debris along the logistical facilities, which with their size, organization, and situation in the context is currently considered to offer little to the communities or landscape they serve. The typology of linearity is adopted here as catalysts to repair peripheral conditions and establish a harmony amongst various factors. In this approach, extension allows the linear typology to frame an edge on a slender site, while flexibility in its organization and site situation enable incremental adaptation to suit the needs of the various networks

served. Makerlands counter undeviating approaches through centering flexibility to anticipate changing needs. This is seen in the multiple formal and organizational schemes. A multitude of arrangements can be conceived that can increase or shrink in size over time.

Fig 5.10

Makerlands Drawn by Author, Rashida Momoh.

This proposal takes the modularity and ideas around placement of servicing and creates a modular system based on an 8 meter grid. It combines circulation and waste functions in a repetitive module and explores how interior arrangements can be shaped as the cores expand and contract.

Long Linear Typologies Infrastuctural grounds

Natural & artifitial Armatures Fig 5.11:

New Meadowlands typological inverventions. MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN with Deltares; 75B; and Volker Infra Design https://www. rebuildbydesign.org/ work/funded-projects/ new-meadowlands/ Accessed on: 30/05/2022

Fig 5.12:

A Mound that allows retreat and protect from flood areas and at the same time, generates logistical corridors continuity and critical support services construction. Drwan by Author, Eduardo. Based on New Meadowlands project.

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A continuous berm articulates a linear armature in New Meadowlands. This mound concentrates critical services and opportunities to generate value. The form of this berm changes and adapts to the marshlands coastal morphology. The linearity of the infrastructure ground and its approach and separation to the coast line, allows the enlargement and shrinking of the ecological patches.

commercial uses and a cultural centre. They can become part of a proposed circular economy in one building. Live, work, produce, as a neighbourhood, as a small city. Infrastructure Ground project reads a potential construction over a berm such as CLCLR organised new edification over an existing building. It is a reading of new functions connected through a logistic corridor that gives this building the possibility to operate as a linear productive chain.

The project developed by Hütten & Paläste, CRCLR House, uses a linear typology that through laminar distribution organises the programmatic amalgamation of residential units, co-work space, productive ateliers,

The proposal of Infrastructrue Grounds shows a typological experimentation of linear armatures to intensifify existing warehouses and projecting new critical support services.

Fig 5.13:

CRCLR House, Berlin, 2016. Image by Hütten & Paläste. https://www.huettenundpalaeste.de/ work/agora-wohnen-celab/

Fig 5.14-5.15:

Study diagrams. From CRCLR to Infrastructure Grounds. Experimenting with linearity, continuity, layering and repetition. Drawn by Eduardo.

Design exploration Fig 5.16:

Typology Models Photograph. By Author, Eduardo.

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Deep Plan Typologies Integration within matrix

Assemblage and Mobility Fig 5.17-5.20:

Integration and Felxibility of Grids. Communal Villa. Dogma. https://www.scielo.cl/ scielo.php?pid=S0717-6 9962018000100044&scr ipt=sci_arttext&tlng=en

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The emerging trend of collective life and combination of work-living and the potential integration of farmingliving demands deeper and richer composition of space in accommodating variated needs of collective life. The typology of matrix or chessboard plan offers adequate mobility and tolerance in generating multi-participatory collective lives.

Communal Villa is a model for the provision of collective housing designed by Dogma (Pier Vittorio Aureli & Martino Tattara) for around 50 artists. The overall concept focuses on a realistic housing model for those artists who choose to live and work together. The designers argue that new forms of production nowadays mean that work and life overlap to the extent that they become indistinguishable. Each villa consists of individual spaces (bunk boxes) and collective spaces (studios, workshops, kitchens, saunas, sound rooms, nurseries, etc.). This organisation aims to maximise the collective space and minimise the individual space, allowing the latter to become a real space of refuge while encouraging tenants to live in the collective space.

The 3*3 matrix system explored by John Hejduk offers a base for a further space composition. Hejduk carefully experimented with the possible spatial compositions by applying envelope, offsetting, shrinking, breaking and sub-dividing. The interfaces, consisting of the pillars and walls, are the framing structure and also the generator and regulator of the domains defined by them. This series of exploration offer a rich instrumental toolbox and show the flexibility and tolerance for assemblages and integration within the grid of matrix system.

Fig 5.21-5.24:

3*3 Matrix. Texas House 1-4. John Hejduk ; edited by Kim Shkapich.Mask of Medusa : works 1947-1983. New York : Rizzoli, 1985. P223-229

Fig 5.26-5.27:

Integration of towers. Student Housing. CF Moller Architects. https://www.archdaily. com/785806/studenthousing-cf-moller

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Deep Plan Typologies Design exploration

Fig 5.28-5.32:

Re-assemblage and derivation of checkboad typology. Collective Living. Drawn by Author, Hejia Guan.

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The proposal of the Intensified Collective Living in the periphery aims to suggest the possible lifestyle in a vision of de-urbanization in the future demanding a retreat from nature. Checker board typology is adopted to seeking for an efficient and economical form for repetitions in a way that identifies a specific modal number and spatial unit for collective living that can be self-replicating and can be applied to a variety of community-scale environments.

The living units based on the reassemblage and integration of the checker board typology offer standardized minimum living units with flexible and generous collective space which is organized in an open block strategy with the mobility to integrate with the courtyards system, creating a vast hybrid of publicprivate space complex.

The proposal of a High Street Farm is an exploration of the integration of vertical farming and tower living on multiple scales, aiming to suggest a possible form of self-sufficient components of an ecological biomimicry pattern of urbanization. The interlocked dual space system of void (food) + solid (living) shows flexibility and enables the mutually beneficial symbiosis between the two systems.

Especially, when the void shares an imitated volume of space as a domestic room, its potential of achieving a domestic interior quality would be evoked, and positively generate varied extensions of domestic activities.

Fig 5.33-5.37

Verticle farming + Verticle living enabled by matrix typology. Drawn by Author, Guang Ren.

By adding void/nature/food as rooms into the composition of matrix system, with the variations of the envelope, interfaces and offset and the integration between units, it opens up new possibilities for both domestic spatial qualities and the additional collective productive activities.

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Deep Plan Typologies Open structure:

Flexibility, Transparency, Permeability Fig 5.38-5.39:

Open plan enabling mix-use. Public Condenser. France. MUOTO. 2016 https://www.archdaily. com/802946/public-condenser-muoto

Fig 5.40-5.41:

Typology Diagram. Drawn by Author, Ishani.

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The typology of open structure could be the one which works on the principles of transparency, flexibility and permeability. It enables the mixed-use genre of artefacts, which meanwhile augmenting and reacting to the landscape with Flexibility.

Public Condenser by Muoto Architects is a mixedused building with indoor and outdoor facilities like a restaurant, sports area and parking areas for deliveries. This linear facility has a central core which enables vertical circulation through the staircase. This public condenser also employs an open plan by shifting the horizontal circulatory spaces to the periphery of the artefact. Principles like the use of vertical and horizontal circulation to create a fair outlined open plan so that, the plan becomes liberated from the circulatory spaces and then this open plan could be employed to fit in the mixed-used facilities and services. The open plan in this case is seen as an exemplar of mixing several activities and facilities to enable interaction, transparency and openness through the built fabric.

The investigation of Steno Diabetes Centre is the second strategic system to understand the plan-metric spatial system of the artefact. The exemplar is a porous mat building that is getting the outdoor green infrastructure indoors, creating a well-stitched environment stimulating healing. Treatment and diagnostic rooms were placed around six courtyards; the rooms were interspersed by waiting rooms, eatery units, libraries and research units. The layout of the consultation and treatment rooms was clean with a proper work desk system for consultation, diagnosis chair, and sink slab for research and keeping samples. The courtyards were defined as squares of various activities like food lab and café, nutrition square, knowledge square, and fitness square.

Fig 5.42-5.44:

Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen. Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects, Mikkelsen Architects. 2016. https://www.archdaily.com/803283/ this-copenhagen-diabetes-center-connects-patients-to-nature

Fig 5.45:

Typology diagram. Drawn by Author, Anindita.

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Deep Plan Typologies Design exploration

Fig 5.46-5.48:

Open plan. Recycling Factory. Drawn by Author, Haobo.

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The open block is a way for mycelial waste decomposition plants and reprocessing workshops to be located in the same place without interfering. This provides space where industrial waste processing, reproduction and knowledge sharing can be carried out, thus achieving the connection between the different groups. The movement of people and the transport of goods are kept separate by landscaping. The landscaping permits visitors to move freely through the public in-processing areas without interrupting the goods flow hidden by the landscape.

This collaborative model among users and local stakeholders strengthens partnerships with local communities. They shared the management of gardens, agriculture, recycling, public canteens and other ecosystems, as well as organising community gatherings, awareness-raising and public canteens. They attempted to intertwine the economic, social and ecological aspects with each other so that access the goal of making a stronger connection between the different regions and creating a collective living mode.

The Sanctuary is a comprehensive strategy for healing both people and the environment. A healthcare Sanctuary is a new system thinking through every aspect of healing and living. The proposed system uses the fundamental concepts of filter, Interlock, and threshold to adapt and augment the current system. The filter concept proposes a new programmatic structure that filters healthcare issues and deploys the new structure for holistic healing. Interlock act as a spatial concept to enhance and enrich human and non-human interaction.

Thresholds act as a flexible and the most significant structure for thriving human complexity and diversity. create a new strategy and model for healing.

Fig 5.49-5.51:

Open Plan. A Health Sanctuary. Drawn by Author, Anindita.

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Deep Plan Typologies Vertical Interlocked Juxtaposition: Buffer and Threshold

Flexibility, Transparency, Permeability Fig 5.52-5.54:

Vertical interlock. La Serre. MVRDV. France. 2017. https://www.mvrdv.nl/ projects/304/la-serre

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Deep Plan also enables new possibilities of vertical integration and hybrid. The demands of light leads to the typology of vertical buffer and envelope space system. It enables the continuity between environment and interior and also stimulate hybrid use and multiple events.

The investigation of La Serre, is an exemplary deepplan project by MVRDV. La Serre is a haven immersed in greenery; it is a micro village in the city’s heart. La Serre’s stacking is inspired by the Mikado stack, a game of sticks, where each stick is structurally stable and creates an interlocked structure. The mikado stacking applied in La Serre created interlocks that transcended green social infrastructure pockets. It creates a vertical neighbourhood having housing units and social intricacies. The housing units break the conventional notion of housing and provide new lifestyle forms in a lush greenhouse imparting a controlled environment.

Design exploration

The proposed artefact of Health Sanctuary is divided into two genres of health and live structures. These structures are connected by the threshold space encompassing fluid transition from health to live areas. The space also acts as a connector for varied volumes. Several strategies are investigated to understand scalar and typological variation in threshold spaces. The layout of treatment rooms and weaving of the insideoutside created an open but secured spatial structure. The interlocked stacking and creating of social spaces and living units were slightly augmented for application

to the proposed artefact to enhance sociability and green structures. The fenestration using a similar winter garden concept was used in the artefact.

Fig 5.55-5.57:

Verticle interlock. A Health Sanctuary. Drawn by Author, Anindita.

The threshold space acts as a potential event space for massive recreation or therapeutic activities. Smaller threshold spaces can be an space with interactive spaces for small intimate groups. These threshold spaces are points for interaction conducive to collective healing.

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NEW LAND MANAGEMENT PARADIGMS Land Assembly and Land Management News from Now Here Postcards

6 113

Land Assembly and Land Management

Fig 6.01:

Thamesmead Development based on the masterlan of Landlease. 2019 https://www.constructionenquirer. com/2019/02/15/lendlease-wins-8bn-thamesmead-development/

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Present stakeholder structure Thamesmead was originally managed and planned by Greater London Council (GLC). In 1985, the government took the decision to abolish the GLC and transferred ownership of Thamesmead to Thamesmead Town Limited (TTL) which was formally established in 1986, following a public vote. The organisation took the form of a private company limited by guarantee with no shareholders, operating as a ‘community-controlled housing company, In 2014, Peabody brought the three organisations together, acquired over 80% of the Thamesmead lands. Peabody is currently made up of three main divisions. Gallions Housing Association serves as a registered social landlord responsible for owning and managing homes; Trust Thamesmead, as a charitable trust with responsibility for community development and regeneration; and Tilfen Land, as a commercial company with responsibility for managing commercial and industrial property. In 2019, Peabody picked Lendlease as preferred bidder for the £8bn, 11,500 home, Thamesmead Waterfront

development, working in a corporate joint venture to masterplan and deliver the mammoth scheme over the next 30 years. The Government, the Community and Peabody all play an important role in Thamesmead’s interest structure, with Peabody being responsible for negotiating and coordinationing with the major players involved. Peabody is responsible for negotiating projects with major companies, managing and planning Thamesmead, and raising and distributing funds, working with both government departments such as the NHS and other private companies such as YouthBuild and EU Horizon 2020 CLEVER and community organisations such as Hamesmead Moorings Ward Councillors. While the community takes part in advising the residents of Thamesmead on development projects, expressing their needs and defending their rights. The government facilitates the development through law and policy to protect Thamesmead legal rights from being infringed upon by the speculation of developers.

Need for New Development Patterns As Haven Urbanism suggests, a strategic anticipatory and networked infrastructural development requires stakeholders to reconsider land management models. We must understand how to develop a more participatory system in which communities can actively participate not only in the design process, but also the long-term management of the places in which they live. These land management systems must also accept that thoughts and needs change over time, therefore a high degree of flexibility is needed to accommodate not only growth, but also retreat. Pivotal artefacts will build new interest and material cycle system to achieve decentralised bottom-up patipcipation and horizental interraction between communities and companies. A series of new programmes, like urban food production, sustainable material production, waste recycling, clean energy catching, storing and reuse, etc. would not be isolated functional buildings but become a series of mutual supporting spontaneous ecological components by the symbiosis integration of these

programmes as a significant part of our daily lives. The assemblage between themselves and conventional service facilities like schools and community facilities would form new civic centers. Through adding pivotal atefacts and events, we will redefine investment value and district coorperation. Peabody’s unique position as a overall facilitator of development should be pushed further. Central to forming new land management paradigms is establishing a dialogue amongst urban actors. Urban actors should act in a more collaborative fashion drawing in a multitude of actors across varied networks to establish a web of services, housing, and infrastructure. Their role as the facilitator will be to produce the framework for a new way of life that residents can adapt at a local level in a self-sufficient habitat.

Fig 6.02:

Thamesmead Stakholders Diagram. Drawn by Author, Liyi.

115

Land Assembly and Land Management

116

New stakeholders strucure In Vital the critical support center, the pivotal artefact, embedded in the augmented landscape with considerations of the hydrology distribution, providing emergency services like a vaccination centre, spaces required in epidemic/pandemic for treatment of patients and also storage facilities, demands for a cross-decipline cooperations, and show great potential in generating new stakeholder arrangements. In High Street Farm, the dual space system and the productive podium armature with fractal units indicate multiple decentralized ways of organization. The

productive units, like several layers of the vertical farm as a unit, together with the productive 'workshops' of the podium, could be run by different participators, like the tower residents themselves, a school class, an agricultural experiment studio, et cetera. Besides, it also suggests the cooperation between these selforganized units and the resident community in sharing communal spaces and harvested food. Also, part-time jobs during busy seasons become possible for residents to participate. The spontaneous symbiotic units open the possibilities of the organization form of multi-

participation and cooperation to absorb innovation while reducing waste of energy and labour. Based on this idea of a decentralized participatory pattern of organization and the mutual-benefit programmes interrelated across territories, this network of pivotal artifacts offer an insight into the possible trajectory of establishing an associationalism1 pattern of organization, in which self-organized professional associations take responsibilities to offer public services with wide voluntary participation and cross-disciplines cooperation. 1. Paul, Hirst. Associative Democracy. 1st ed. 2013. Reprint, Wiley, 2013. Chapter one & two. https://www.perlego.com/book/1535477/ associative-democracy-pdf.

Fig 6.03:

Thamesmead Development and stakeholders model based on the network of pivotal artefacts. Drawn by Author, Ishani, Hejia, Weilin.

117

News from now here Fig 6.04:

High Street Farm. By Author, Guang.

We woke up early this morning, and met at the ridgeway at the west of Thamesmead. From this higher point, nothing looked the same. The marshlands that were once separated from the river and fragmented by highways and industrial fenced areas was now a continuous patch that seemed limitless. The grass had grown and the tidal walls were no longer there, soft waves were touching the woods that now cross the whole shore defined by high and low grounds. Tidal walls are no more than ruins that together with the old machines and sheds that used to rule the landscape, are now part of the pleasant paths that are shared by the inhabitants and the fauna that has reclaimed its territory in what it seems like a new town or perhaps a new territory.

118

While we walk through the woods, we visualised a light-weight structure suspended from the ground and blended with the numerous trees that have populated what I could no longer recognise as my neighbourhood. Dozens of children crossed between its columns to arrive to the semi-open spaces of this framework, and to the schools that now seemed connected to this artefact. A rain shower washed the pathway, we stayed in that hub for some minutes waiting until the water disappeared under and around the volume.

Fig 6.05:

Collective Living. By Author, Hejia.

119

Fig 6.06:

Civic Support Hub. By Author, Ishani.

120

Moving eastwards, we could talk with some families that were close to the South Mere lake where we used to play together when we were younger. They were sharing the space with other residents in a modular framed space that was flexible enough to use it in the most creative ways possible. I could identify different generations working together in expanding this structure in different directions.

At the end of our promenade, farmers came from a porous berm structure that supported what can be described as a market where fruits and vegetables were grown and extracted, enormous white windmills surrounded the system of towers and berm populated by other farmers and visitants that exchanged the food produced in this elevated area. Towers were no longer the concrete monoliths that I remembered, now were hidden behind a layer of vertical green agricultural walls that apparently allocate high pathways and some kind of irrigation system that refreshed the surrounding air. The old Town of Tomorrow has changed again: It is no longer divided by the promised structures of a development that never arrived for us. The Thames is no longer behind a wall, it has taken back its territory and provide fertile ground for new ecosystems to flourish.

Fig 6.07:

Infrastructure Grounds. By Author, Eduardo.

People has moved from their old houses to some kind of ‘Breathing Space’ forming new self-sufficient spaces, interconnected and away from flooding areas. Ready for what lies ahead.

121

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Koolhaas Rem and Mau Bruce, S, M, L, XL, (The Monacelli Press, Inc., America, 1995)

Nantes School of Architecture / Lacaton & Vassal, (ArchDaily, July 2016) Accessed 22 May 2022. https://www.archdaily.com/254193/nantes-schoolof-architecture-lacaton-vassal

“THE THINKBELT: THE UNIVERSITY THAT NEVER WAS.” 2014. Discover Society. July 1, 2014. https://archive.discoversociety.org/2014/07/01/thethinkbelt-the-university-that-never-was/.

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SOA Architects. La Fabrique Agricole. https://

Biel, Robert. Sustainable food systems: the role of the city. London: UCL Press, 2016. https://www. jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1j1vzc5

Chadwick, Peter and Ben Weaver. The Town of tomorrow. 50 years of Thamesmead. London: Here Press. 2019 Doucet, Isabelle. Anticipating Fabulous Futures. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/ overgrowth/284918/anticipating-fabulous-futures/ Accessed on: 20/05/22 Hirst, Paul. Associative Democracy. 1st ed. 2013. Reprint, Wiley, 2013. https://www.perlego.com/ book/1535477/associative-democracy-pdf. Hejduk, John; edited by Shkapich, Kim. Mask of Medusa: works 1947-1983. New York : Rizzoli, 1985. Heuvel, Dirk van den. Martens, Janno. Sanz, Víctor Muñoz. eds. Habitat: Ecology Thinking In Architecture. Rotterdam: Nai010 publishers, 2021 Koolhaas, Rem and Mau, Bruce. edited by Sigler, Jennifer. Office for Metropolitan Architecture. S, M, L, XL : small, medium, large, extra-large. New York: Monacelli Press, 1998. Marot, Sébastien Edited. Taking the Country’s Side: Agriculture and Architecture. Lisbon: Lisbon Architecture Triennale; Barcelona: Polígrafa, 2019. MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN. The New Meadowlands. https://rebuildbydesign.org/wp-content/ uploads/2021/12/672.pdf Andreas Ruby and Ilka Ruby. ed. Infrastructure Space. Berlin: Ruby Press 2017 Steel, Carolyn. Sitopia: how food can save the world. London: Chatto & Windus, 2020.

Table of Images

Fig 1.1: Sketch of the New Town of Hook. Source: Chadwick, Peter and Ben Weaver. The Town of tomorrow. 50 years of Thamesmead. London: Here Press. https://www.herepress.org/books-prints/50years-of-thamesmead/ Fig 1.2: The entrance to the concrete Source: “The Making of Thamesmead.” n.d. Thamesmead Community https://thamesmeadcommunityarchive.org.uk/ explore/stories/construction-the-making-ofthamesmead Fig 1.3: The fabrication of concrete parts in factory Source: “The Making of Thamesmead.” n.d. Thamesmead Community https://thamesmeadcommunityarchive.org.uk/ explore/stories/construction-the-making-ofthamesmead Fig 1.4: The site was still being constructed. Source: “The Making of Thamesmead.” n.d. Thamesmead Community https://thamesmeadcommunityarchive.org.uk/ explore/stories/construction-the-making-ofthamesmead Fig 1.5: the estuary of the Thames. Source: Haobo Yan Fig 1.6: Sea level rise. Source: Haobo Yan Fig 1.7: Peaday’s management plans Source: Thamesmead 2050“StackPath.” n.d. June 8, 2022. Fig 1.8: The drawing of A Network of Self-sufficient urban units/Drawing by Guang Ren

Fig 2.8: Willem Jan Neutelings. Patchwork metropolis in The Hague and Rotterdam region, 1990. From website TotalSpace, https:// totalspace.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/habitatexpanding-architecture/patchwork-metropolis. Fig 2.9: Patchwork metropolis. Neutelings, Willem Jan. Willem Jan Neutelings, architect. Uitgeverij 010 (1 Jan. 1991). Fig 2.10: Book Cover, From Neutelings. Willem Jan Neutelings, architect. Fig 2.11: Patchwork metropolis 1989-2014-A , by Jan Neutelings. Fig 2.12: Patchwork metropolis 1989-2014-B , by Jan Neutelings

Fig 2.2: Thamesmead’s photo-A, by Author.

Fig 2.13: the Neighbourhood Unit, by Clarence A. Perry. Fig 2.14: The Current Neighbourhood by Author. Fig 2.15: Peripheral Corridors, by Author. Fig 2.16: Peripheral Green Infrastructure, by Author. Fig 2.17: Current photo of Thamesmead-A, by Author. Fig 2.18: Current photo of Thamesmead-B, by Author. Fig 2.19: Current photo of Thamesmead-C, by Author. Fig 2.20: Vehicular Mobility Infrastructure, by Author.

Fig 2.34: Current photo of Thamesmead-M, by Author. Fig 2.35: Current photo of Thamesmead-N, by Author. Fig 2.36: Current photo of Thamesmead-O, by Author. 3.1 https://speedbird.wordpress.com/2016/02/16/ antecedents-of-the-minimum-viable-utopia-cliffharpers-visions-series/

3.3 Ibid. 3.4 https://www.designboom.com/architecture/ guallart-architects-self-sufficient-city-housingpost-covid-08-11-2020/ 3.5 Ibid. 3.6 Ibid. 3.7 Stan Allen, Points and Lines, (Princeton Architecture Press, 1999). 3.8 Mathur Anuradhaand CunhaDilip da, Desinging the coast in the Moment of Rain in Infrastructure Space. ed. Andreas Ruby and Ilka Ruby.(Berlin: Ruby Press 2017) 3.9 https://spacecollector.wordpress.com/ category/melun-senart/

Fig 2.21: Current photo of Thamesmead-D, by Author.

3.10 Ibid.

Fig 2.22: Current photo of Thamesmead-E, by Author.

3.11 Presentation; Housing and Urbanism (Grp: Thamesmead Transition)

Fig 2.23: Current photo of Thamesmead-F, by Author.

3.12 Drawing by author, Guang Ren

Fig 2.25: Current photo of Thamesmead-G, by Author. Fig 2.26: Current photo of Thamesmead-H, by Author.

Fig 2.3: Thamesmead’s photo-B, by Author. Fig 2.4: Children playing at Southmere Lake, From website architectsjournal, https://www. architectsjournal.co.uk/news/exclusivethamesmead-mega-project-architect-revealed.

Fig 2.33: Industrial Lands, by Author.

3.2 Ibid.

Fig 2.24: Thames River conditions, by Author. Fig 2.1: Thamesmead in 1970s,From website wallpaper, https://www.wallpaper.com/ architecture/thamesmead-exhibition-riba-london.

Fig 2.32: Current photo of Thamesmead-L, by Author.

Fig 2.27: Current photo of Thamesmead-I, by Author. Fig 2.28: Heterogeneous Patches, by Author. Fig 2.29: Medium density patches, by Author.

3.13 Drawing by authors, Harper Guan and Ishani Shah 4.1.1-4.1.2: SOA Architects, La Fabrique Agricole. https://soa.archi/fr/architecture/project/lafabrique-agricole/ 4.1.3-4.1.4: Effekt Architects, Regen Villages https://www.effekt.dk/regenvillages 4.1.5-4.1.12: Drawing by Author, Weilin Zhi. 4.1.13: Collective Housing 110 Rooms https://www.archdaily.com/968030/collectivehousing-110-rooms-maio.

Fig 2.5: Thamesmead’s photo-C, by Author. Fig 2.6: Thamesmead’s photo-D, by Author. Fig 2.7: Thamesmead’s photo-E, by Author.

Fig 2.30: Current photo of Thamesmead-J, by Author. Fig 2.31: Current photo of Thamesmead-K, by Author.

4.1.14: Communal villa https://hiddenarchitecture.net/communal-villa/ 4.1.15-4.1.23: Drawing by Author, Hejia Guan

123

4.2.16 Ibid. 4.1.24: Public Condensor by Muoto Architects; the exemplar shows the variety of programs accomodate by employing an open-plan https://www.archdaily.com/802946/publiccondenser-muoto

4.2.17 Ibid. 4.2.18 Ibid.

4.3.26-4.3.27: Ground Interventions developed by OMA for HUB project, Rebuild By Design. Courtesy: RBD website https://rebuildbydesign.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/673.pdf Accessed on: 30/05/2022

4.2.19 Ibid. 4.1.25: Architecture school by Lacaton and Vassal Open-plan employing flexibility and adaptability. https://www.archdaily.com/254193/nantes-schoolof-architecture-lacaton-vassal

4.2.20 Ibid. 4.2.21 https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/ overgrowth/284918/anticipating-fabulous-futures/ 4.2.22 https://archive.discoversociety. org/2014/07/01/the-thinkbelt-the-university-thatnever-was/

Fig 5.1-5.2: Habitat in the city. W.J. Neutelings, A. Wall, X. De Geyter and F. Roodbe.1990 https://socks-studio.com/2016/07/13/habitat-andthe-city-competition-entry-by-neutelings-wallde-geyter-and-roodbeen-1990/

4.2.23 Drawing by author, Liyi Tan.

Fig 5.3: Drawn by Author, Rashida Momoh.

4.2.24 Ibid.

Fig 5.4-5.6: Gifu Kitagata Apartment Building. Sanna. 1994-2000

4.1.26-4.1.28: Drawing by Author, Ishaniben Shah 4.1.29:Steno Diabetes Centre, the current healthcare programmatic trends https://www.sdcc.dk/ 4.1.30: The Urban Village, the interiority and programmatic structure https://www.effekt.dk/urbanvillage

4.3.28-4.3.33: Drawing by Author, Eduardo Carcavilla.

4.2.25 Ibid. 4.1.31-4.1.33: Drawing by Author, Anindita Shrivastava 4.1.34: The growing pavillion https://thegrowingpavilion.com/about/ 4.1.35: R-Urban Project http://r-urban.net/en/ activities/922/ 4.1.36: Moriyama House Source:“Edmund Sumner Reveals Decade-Old Photographs of Ryue Nishizawa at His Seminal Moriyama House. 4.1.37: MVRDV - Markthal Source: “MVRDV - Markthal.” n.d. Www.mvrdv.nl.‌ 4.1.38: Le Fresnoy Art CentreSource: “GRID SECOND LIFE.” n.d. Accessed June 8, 2022.

4.2.27 Ibid.

http://architecture-history.org/architects/ architects/SEJIMA/OBJECTS/1994-2000,%20 Gifu%20Kitagata%20Apartment%20Building,%20 Gifu,%20Japan.html

4.2.28 Ibid.

Fig 5.7-5.8:Drawn by Author, Rashida Momoh.

4.2.29 Ibid.

Fig 5.9:Drawn by Author, Ishani Shah.

4.2.30 Ibid.

Fig 5.10: Drawn by Author, Rashida Momoh. Fig 5.11:MIT CAU + ZUS + URBANISTEN with Deltares; 75B; and Volker Infra Design https://www.rebuildbydesign.org/work/fundedprojects/new-meadowlands/ Accessed on: 30/05/2022

4.2.26 Ibid.

4.3.1:Hutten & Palaste, https://www. huettenundpalaeste.de/work/agora-wohnen-celab/ 4.3.2: Assemble, https://assemblestudio.co.uk/ projects/blackhorse-workshop 4.3.3-4.3.13: Drawing by Author, Rashida Momoh

Fig 5.12: Drwan by Author, Eduardo. Based on New Meadowlands project.

4.3.14: Nest We Grow Project https://www.archdaily.com/592660/nest-wegrow-college-of-environmental-design-ucberkeley-kengo-kuma-and-associates

Fig 5.13:CRCLR House, Berlin, 2016. Image by Hütten & Paläste. https://www.huettenundpalaeste.de/work/agorawohnen-celab/ Fig 5.14-5.15: Drawn by Eduardo.

4.2.4 Ibid.

4.3.15: Student Housing https://www.archdaily.com/785806/studenthousing-cf-moller

4.2.5 Ibid.

4.3.16-4.3.23: Drawing by Author, Guang Ren

4.2.6 Ibid

4.3.24: New Meadowlands typological inverventions. MIT CAU + ZUS +URBANISTEN with Deltares; 75B; and Volker Infra Design https://www.rebuildbydesign.org/work/fundedprojects/new-meadowlands/

Fig 5.17-5.20: Communal Villa. Dogma. https://www.scielo.cl/scielo.php?pid=S071769962018000100044&script=sci_arttext&tlng=en Fig 5.21-5.24: Texas House 1-4. John Hejduk ; edited by Kim Shkapich.Mask of Medusa : works 1947-1983. New York : Rizzoli, 1985. P223-229

4.2.1 https://caruso.arch.ethz.ch/project/739 4.2.2 https://spacecollector.wordpress.com/ category/melun-senart/ 4.2.3 Drawing by author, Ishani Shah

4.2.7 Ibid. 4.2.8 Ibid. 4.2.9 Richard T.T Foreman, Land Mosaic (Cambridge University Press, 1995). 4.2.10 Ibid. 4.2.11 Ibid.

4.3.24: New Meadowlands typological inverventions. MIT CAU + ZUS +URBANISTEN with Deltares; 75B; and Volker Infra Design https://www.rebuildbydesign.org/work/funded-projects/new-meadowlands/ Accessed on: 30/05/2022

Fig 5.16: By Author, Eduardo.

Fig 5.26-5.27: Student Housing. CF Moller Architects. https://www.archdaily.com/785806/studenthousing-cf-moller Fig 5.28-5.32: Drawn by Author, Hejia Guan.

4.2.12 Ibid. 4.2.13 Ibid. 4.2.14 Drawing by author, Anindita Shrivastava

124

4.2.15 Ibid.

4.3.25: Drawing by Author, Eduardo Carcavilla. Based on: New Meadowlands Sections. MIT CAU + ZUS +URBANISTEN with Deltares; 75B; and Volker Infra Design https://www.rebuildbydesign.org/work/funded-projects/new-meadowlands/ Accessed on: 30/05/2022

Fig 5.33-5.37: Drawn by Author, Guang Ren. Fig 5.38-5.39: Public Condenser.France. MUOTO. 2016 https://www.archdaily.com/802946/publiccondenser-muoto

Fig 5.40-5.41: Drawn by Author, Ishani.

Fig 5.55-5.57: Drawn by Author, Anindita.

Fig 5.42-5.44: Steno Diabetes Center Copenhagen. Vilhelm Lauritzen Architects, Mikkelsen Architects. 2016. https://www.archdaily.com/803283/thiscopenhagen-diabetes-center-connects-patientsto-nature

Fig 6.01: Thamesmead Development based on the masterlan of Landlease. 2019 https://www.constructionenquirer.com/2019/02/15/ lendlease-wins-8bn-thamesmead-development/

Fig 5.45: Drawn by Author, Anindita. Fig 5.46-5.48: Drawn by Author, Haobo.

Fig 6.03: Drawn by Author, Ishani, Hejia, Weilin . Fig 6.04: By Author, Guang.

Fig 5.49-5.51: Drawn by Author, Anindita.

Fig 6.05: By Author, Hejia.

Fig 5.52-5.54: La Serre. MVRDV. France. 2017. https://www.mvrdv.nl/projects/304/la-serre

Fig 6.06: By Author, Ishani.

Fig 6.02: Drawn by Author, Liyi.

Fig 6.07: By Author, Eduardo.

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LIVING ON THE EDGE AA Housing and Urbanism