11:30 rC18 urban sTiMuli

Students: Mengxue Du, Pramod Vikram Balaji, tianqi lin, Yanli li

Design: Enriqueta Llabres-Valls, Zachary Flucker

Theory: William Huang

The evolving global coffee culture has made a massive leap in the coffee industry and established a targeted consumer market globally. The demand for coffee from different geographical locations indirectly adds production pressure in the tropical regions of the globe, which leads to the spatial expansion of the coffee plantations to the detriment of tropical forests. The market leader, Starbucks Corporation, has significantly impacted the coffee belt with the introduction of the Arabica coffee bean worldwide. Urban Stimuli is a planetary-level urban design project that engages Starbucks Corporation to provide an alternative solution to the global coffee supply chain. The project uses evolutionary design theories to propose an artificial coffee plantation that will grow and adapt to the Manhattan conditions in New York.