A
STUDIO PROJECT
COMM[UNIT]Y
Jing Deng, Lu Feng,Yimeng Sun, Ximing Chen and Emmanuel Lopez
San Cristobal, a special rural administrative unit of Medellin, has been confronted with pressure brought by fast-paced economic growth and population boom in recent years. These factors have been reflected in the living conditions at a regional scale. On one hand, defined as informal settlements from a legal perspective, local residents and new migrations constantly occupy land by building their own houses without formal planning. On the other hand, as the government began to supply the area with high-rise social housing, it was clear that these towers had little relationship with the physical and social context of the site. Through research, an evaluation can be made that both housing typologies are not only inappropriate for future development of San Cristobal due to their fundamental problematic logics of growth, but also cause and extend issues to environment and society: landslide, water pollution, farmland degradation and lacking of open space. The commUNITy project is a critique to the existing typologies, as well as a response to the quandaries of San Cristobal. The project of commUNITy emphasizes the capabilities of units within the community, by attempting to compose a new development model with small, basic and systematic tools. The goal is to provide a method that can accommodate the growing density, and at the same time be sustainable and adaptable to a larger horizon in San Cristobal. Through this project, two essential notions will be set up for the new development pattern. The first one being a basic toolkit is accessible, affordable, and applicable for local people to assemble their own houses and improve their living environment. The second one is a strategic framework of growth that not only captures the passion and effort of individuals, but also be able to combine them with power and capacity of the government and upscale organizations. As a result, efficient collaborations among different groups in the society can be achieved. In this approach, the first step is to design scalar landscape and architectural units at a conceptual level, extracting intellectual parts from local constructing practice (e.g. flexible growth) as well as imported innovative ideas (e.g. gabions). The next step is to reconfigure these incremental units to form a series of combinations that are applicable to conditions in urban, rural or in-between areas. Last but not least, in the physical environment these combinations can be manipulated and developed to create either a site-specific moment, or an entire neighborhood composition. In the whole process of implementing this methodology in reality, it involves government constructed infrastructure like slope-stabilizing walls and terraces, allows self-built practices using local materials, and encourages social engagements preserving open space and local lifestyle to improve living quality. Finally, with the components providing paradigms dealing with specific problems, these methodologies can be learned and applied to other sites with similar issues, whilst the proposed community design as a whole at a testing site that is between informal settlements and high-rise social housings offers an example to reserve social capital and mediate urban fabrics.