Pre-emptive Transformation [electronic resource].

Benjamin Wells 2019

Open access content

Cities are full of spatial constructs that fuel, frame and glorify the growth agenda. Factories, shopping malls, motorways, tower blocks, petrol stations, speculative housings – all are products of, but also perpetuators of, the narrative of constant growth. These forms and the practices they host are unsustainable, yet we patiently wait for their industries to fade (or crash) into obsoletion before we begin to ponder their possible spatial transformation. Globalisation has been highly effective in de-visualising the effects of unsustainable practices – production is screened from consumption, labour is concealed from play – and this has hindered our ability to act. When we finally do, the answer is either to adapt and regenerate, glorifying these temples of consumption, or to demolish, perpetuating the demand for future growth. This project proposes a radical alternative – pre-emptive transformation. A strategy that foresees and utilises the inevitable decline of growth-based industries by pre-emptively hacking their spatial dependencies. The speculative project depicted here is a possible version of this process. Taking a monolithic fish market in the Northern Japanese city of Ishinomaki, the project proposes a framework for a growth of parasitic interventions. These interventions provide both much-needed housing and spaces of commonality, but critically they force into dialogue both sides of the production-consumption coin. This, over time, has potentially radical consequences. An industry is pushed toward accountability, and a public is activated through awareness and proximity. Perhaps these two realms would even reach a state of equilibrium, in which the industry was restricted to a sustainable level by the interruption of alternative functions, and the city reaches a point of density ideal for its faltering population.
https://www.librarystack.org/pre-emptive-transformation/?ref=unknown

Architects
Architecture

Text

Benjamin Wells