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Nos Vemos en los Arcos! (Meet You at the Arches): A Human and Ecological Infrastructure along London’s Railway

Part 2 Project 2024
Gabriela Mac’Allister
University of Cambridge | UK
Situated in Elephant and Castle, the project speculates on an interdependent way of living in the city - where spaces crafted by the communities inhabiting them are protected rather than dictated. The proposal positions infrastructure as facilitator - catalysing restorative social and environmental processes in the aftermath of regeneration and amid a climate crisis. Proliferating across the borough, the project emerges from the critical fictional scenario of the area’s regeneration stopping due to High Court orders calling for social and environmental accountability. The community’s advocacy efforts paid off, and the path is carved for the project to imagine the future of the Latin American community in the Elephant. Through a magical realist intervention, an infrastructural system is proposed to extend the railway viaduct, re-adapt the ruin (a partially built concrete superstructure) and depollute this pocket of the city through water harvesting and the existing Latin American community, transforming the Elephant into an urban ecosystem of humans and ecology through a landscape urbanist wetland.
Research on the relationship between culture and space underpins this proposition, informing the focus on infrastructure as a facilitator of social and environmental processes. Shifting the architect’s role to the designer of infrastructures that facilitate the emergence of human and ecological programmes, allows for an incremental process of cooperative urban re-regeneration that supports water harvesting and recycling - ultimately giving back the agency to those who craft spaces within.


Tutor(s)
Jonathan Bennett
2024
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