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A Luddite Fallacy: Projections for a New Post-Industrial Landscape

Part 1 Project 2024
Eric Turner
University of Westminster | UK
A Luddite Fallacy proposes an alternative political system and way of living in Grays, Essex, to a backdrop of increasing workplace automation. The project tests generative AI and chance-based workflows, with AI as an inevitable collaborator with the architect of the future.

The proposal is a new city hall for an independent, self-governing Grays, where the local community gains stewardship of the landscape and engages in debate over the construction, conservation and rewilding of the Thames estuary. An empty political testbed is left following the council’s 2022 bankruptcy, allowing a post-scarcity economic system to be established. Situating itself between the Procter & Gamble soap factory and the 13th Century St Clement’s church, the city hall acts as a base point for resistance against further industrialisation, mediating the boundary between production and conservation.

Taking into account the notion of the ‘automated landscape’, where fully automated factories can take on optimised spatial configurations no longer catering for the human body, this surplus space is restored as public land, and excess material is used in the construction of the city hall.


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2024
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