[AI] : CENTER - PERIPHERY ENCODING NEW PROCESSES IN SHENZHEN’S BOUNDARIES

SHENZHEN, CHINA

Harvard GSD - Spring 2020 Option Studio

‘ Neuralisms Shenzhen: Fictions of Type and Territory’

Instructors: Andrew Witt, Robert Pietrusko. Individual Project. Harvard GSD ‘Digital Design Prize’ 2021 Award.

The studio explored imaginative and cross-scalar lifestyle futurisms for Shenzhen, China using tools as remote sensing, deep learning, neural networks, image processing and other leveraging technologies.

Shenzhen’s Urban Growth Boundaries, administrative limits to protect natural areas and touristic circuits have been vulnerable to arbitrary urban expansion in the last decades. Center-Periphery, reimagines these boundaries as sustainable manufacturing poles, responding to both, the need of responsible production chains for the textile industry, and the consolidation of the inner borders to protect natural areas.

Thorugh the use of Artificial Intelligence, a landscape generator assists the urban proposal acroSs selected territories in the city, encoding a new textile industry into the inner borders.

The study of the Urban Growth Boundaries reveals its irregular nature, zoning, and levels of built mass occupation along the Urban Growth Boundaries.

A scanning process supported by satellite imagery and AI image recognition helped to identify potential sites to allocate the facilities of the ‘new’ textile industry and where to bring back nature to the city.

CLUSTERS: CENTER PERIPHERY

The project relies in clusters to host the new production mode while emulating agricultural landscapes. The cluster’s centers were defined by structuring chains such as fiber processing or yarn portfolios, and the periphery was defined by complementary activities.

TOOL: PIX2PIX TRAINING

Two neural networks training processes would assist the design process. The first part would use the center-periphery hierarchy to obtain new cluster combinations and later generate representational approximations to the new landscapes. The second part, consisted in training set to simulate a response of the stormwater collection system to rainwater levels along the year.

[LEFT] The textile production area is selected to further development as the congregation of different production lines: fiber processing, knitting areas, and yarn collection towers were articulated by roads and techno-agricultural fields.

[UP] In the architecture scale, the plan reflects the center – periphery layering of the production processes. The fiber containers perform as cores for the facility, while processing, design and administrative areas are layered around the cores.

The project merges plan and facades to create a productive landscape where crops are cultivated as raw material for organic clothing production, rainwater is collected and reused, and visitors can transit around these new cycles.

From a pedestrian perspective it is possible to perceive the inside to outside transition, opening the industry to ecotourism, and sealing the border with a symbiotic artificial-natural quality.