RC18
Relational Urbanism Enriqueta Llabres, Eduardo Rico with Zachary Fluker
Students Yanxiu Chen, Jinghui Hu, Lei Huang, Jie Kang, Changlin Li, Weilong Li, Yiwen Liu, Guanghui Luo, Waishan Qiu, Meng Ran, Dan Shen, Jia Zhang, Hanxu Zhang, Yunke Zhang
Relational Urbanism explores how digital design techniques influence the way in which we think and design conditions of contemporary urban phenomenon. Moving away from a limited focus on density and centrality, Research Cluster 18 aims to engage with definitions of the urban that encompass the various dispersed territorial systems that currently support agglomeration and growth. This opens the door to new forms of territorial alliances that feed back into the image of the city, its inhabitation and habits of consumption, which raises the following questions on spatial specificity and design agendas: What is the role of design in the engagement with this new definition of metropolis?
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2014
How can we tap into the potential that these territorial systems offer in the creation of new spatial formulas for our cities? This year, we engaged with the definition of the systemic ‘hinterland’ of resource and supply around global city regions, uncovering unexpected geographies and new forms of understanding territory, city and landscape. The Metropolis of Alberta Tar Sand Extraction Tar sands or oil sands are unconventional sources of bitumen, captured in a mixture of oil, clay, sand and water. The recent extraction of this type of oil has resulted in an entire new geographic entity reaching a metropolitan condition in its own right. Extraction landscapes, refinery infrastructures, pipelines and ports form an entire network of new territories, which weave along with a seminomadic structure of inhabitation for mining workers. How can we use design to imagine new forms of metropolis resulting from the conflicts derived from this looming territorial transformation? The Cluster proposes a new form of urban praxis based on a relational approach to design: where design aims to foster the role of the Relational Capital in the territorial morphogenesis, a form of engagement between people, market, institutions and their related environment. Central to this argument is the development of Relational Urban Models (RUMs). These are digital design interfaces that relate spatial aspects of the urban environment derived from parameters (both internal and external to the design) and the representation of key infrastructural and environmental variables (traffic, CO2 emissions, preypredator ecology models, built area). The final aim of this type of model is not just the finalised layout of a rendered masterplan, but the facilitation of discussions about urban form and relationships between different decision makers. This should both unlock development potentials and feed design decisions back into the relational capital in the form of a design protocol. 110