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Collective City

Part 2 Project 2022
Joseph Henry Noah Elbourn
Mackintosh School of Architecture | UK
Collective city synthesizes radical politics of land ownership with the layered histories of our urban environments. It argues that a great act of urban re-commoning of Glasgow’s key underutilised infrastructures, such as its rail corridors and mass tenement housing, would transform the city and make the transition to net-zero by 2030 not only possible, but equitable and resilient. It explores how communal control of the land might re-stitch the existing infrastructures of the city to serve egalitarian purposes for which they were not envisaged. It also asks how their new collective ownership structure would re-orientate their architecture, rejuvenating and reinterpreting their spaces of collectivity and create new ones.

This represents an ideological break with past forms of urban development, particularly the post-war movement that similarly sought to wipe away inequality but conflated this with the wiping away of the entire existing city. Thus, this project takes a different approach.
Encouraging adaptation, extension and insulation of the existing. Furthermore, the system is focused on capturing excess materials produced by these alterations. Redeploying them around the city via a distribution network which uses the existing rail infrastructure, facilitating the movement of materials and labour needed for this urban revolution.


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2022
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