calibrating Timescales

Maturing complex landscapes in a rapidly changing urban environment

Feng Yuanqiu (Hwang Yun Hye)

Conventional real estate practice has always been to clear, build, and revegetate as an afterthought. This process of destruction as the first stroke of realised architecture concludes with the contrived returning of nature onto site by design and curation. Is there a way for the natural to be preserved throughout the seasons of real estate cycles, even becoming an asset? How can we begin to consider a harmonious and synchronised relationship between the urban and the natural?

By mediating at the interstitial networks around existing planning intervals, a green buffer is conceptualised with imbued permanance, envisioned to endure and enhance its shifting urban surroundings.

By moderating the extremes of unrestricted growth with selective alteration, these green networks can work beautify and provide for new developments while decreasing the amount of waste produced and clearing required. A renewed landscape of wild overgrowth may begin to operate and be woven into the hardened urban edges. Between the wild and the fabricated, the urban jungle in its literal sense may emerge and suggest a plausible alternative for the ways in which we plan, build, and live.

^ Conventional and suggested processes v Vision of a matured urban jungle