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Allotment Facilities and Infrastructure - Liverpool

Part 1 Project 2005
Alastair Parvin
University of Sheffield | UK
This project, in liaison with a real-life client, takes a pragmatic, low-scale, low-tech approach to issues of regeneration, nutrition and food production which were presented in the brief. Those who visited the site became fiercely loyal to it, which led me to an exciting (but masochistic) starting point: Rather than collecting all new programs into a single, large ‘Building’ which would alienate the community it was intended to serve; I opted to strategically integrate them into the existing allotment fabric via a series of interventions. This spirit of minimum mass / maximum impact was revealingly difficult to communicate in a school environment.

Alastair Parvin


Set within a suburban hinterland the project explores how inclusive interventions can offer a positive future for an existing community. Early studies focussed on how a new perimeter edge condition could house a number of facilities that would allow residents to promote and cultivate produce. This was married to a highly inventive urban strategy that promoted the wasteland becoming economically viable. The sophistication of thought and architectural application are excellent. This is a fantastic body of work and deserves to be seen and enjoyed by a wider audience.
2005
Liverpool is a city full of holes. Vast chunks of post-industrial terrain vague, perceived by urbanists to be at best empty, at worst, places of social ‘compensation’. But urban voids represent not just loss, but also room to breathe- possibility.
What if there were two cities? One within the other: ephemeral, unofficial. This anti-city complements the first; temporarily inhabiting its vacant space, absorbing its waste, offering economic alternatives. The antidote to mass housing: mass garden.
The project began on an urban scale, proposing the application of a series of ‘Magnets’ (a bow of the head to Cedric Price) to catalyse the unofficial colonisation of neglected wastelands as allotments.
The riskiest, but most rewarding assertion: that ‘A Building’ is exactly what the site doesn’t need.
Two main systems are applied to the site, a boundary wall, populated by mediating programs, and within the site, a network of overhead infrastructure.
The public/private interface wraps into the site, onto a pier which bridges the railway and leads to the geographical centre of the site. This puts the entrance to the allotments in the core of the site rather than at its distant fringes.
View from plot 19.
Isometric overview of the use of boundaries, enabling facilities and infrastructure to invigorate and support allotment life.
Street elevation
Overhead infrastructure rail supports the appropriately portable meeting / education tent.
Compost dropped on the public side of the wall is ‘turned’ over the boundary into silos, quite literally being transformed from an unwanted waste product into an invaluable resource as it crosses the wall, out of sight.
The most public intervention into the wall, where public toilets boast of the ability of bacterial breakdown to turn sewage into biogas, water and natural fertilizer. The odourless sewage beds support indoor exotic plants.
By simply offering warm shelter, tea making facilities and a notice board, the entrance becomes a likely point of social interaction (particularly when it rains).
The challenge was to find a realistic, low-tech way of hiring out tools to members, 24 hours a day, un-staffed. The proposed solution was to convert old shopping trolley locks to take numbered tokens.
The choice of plywood as a material anticipates the entropy of the structure when the wood decomposes. The boundary, explicitly intended to divide, implicitly is intended as a social time-bomb, provoking future interaction between the two parties.
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