top of page

‘Social ecosophy will consist in developing specific practices that will modify and reinvent the ways in which we live as couples or in the family, in an urban context or at work, etc [...] Instead of clinging to general recommendations we would be implementing effective practices of experimentation, as much on a micro social level as on a larger institutional scale.’

Bartlett School of Architecture  _  University College London

                            MArch Urban Design Programme







FARM.ing ENERGY IN THE MEDITERRANEAN, THE CASE OF TUNISIA

 

The studio begins with an examination of Tunis as an extended terrain for new practices of eco-social experimentation, on a micro social level and larger institutional scale.  Four test beds have been identified as examples of the territorial and conflictual dimension of contemporary urbanism: Bizerte, site of the largest reservoir of drinking water in Tunisia, the Tunis South Lake, site of a large and unregulated landfill, Sidi Bouzid, where most of Tunisian food is grown and Tozeur, site of the future large scale DESERTEC solar energy farm.

 

An initial scanning via indexical maps did produce sets of operational fields, embryonic design contexts for the conception of urban prototypes triggering and framing novel practices of farming energy and contributing to the growth of new self-sufficient city models. 

 

Each new urban prototype synthesizes tectonic and material organization from the introduction of specific bio-technologies into the test sites, connecting urban form to the creation of an independent and robust supply chain for food, energy, water and the transformation of waste.

 

At the core of these novel energetic protocols we propose to identify a new conceptual persona, a political subject prefigured in the migrant worker, the political activist, the nomad, the extreme scientist and the unemployed graduate. Engaging this political subject will produce a new agency for architecture.

 

The cluster adopts algorithmic design methods to draw terrains of dispute across strategic and tactical forms of intervention; algorithmic coding enables us to test intentions across a fluid eco-social terrain, generating a multiplicity of responses and effects across scales and regimes [from the molecular to the territorial]. Collaborating with scientist, sociologists, agronomists and engineers, student work oscillates between articulating tectonic solutions, coding urban protocols and breeding material effects.

 

GUATTARI, F. The Three Ecologies. Continuum, London 2000.

BIO-Urban Design Research Cluster

Directed by

Claudia Pasquero and Marco Poletto / ecoLogicStudio

 

 

The dissolution of the dichotomy ‘artifice vs. nature’ opens new possibilities in the conception of the city from a non-anthropocentric perspective.

 

Urban design can then be conceived as the breeding of relationships between industrial, agricultural, biological and social systems. Working on the emergent notion of ‘agri-urbanity’, this research cluster establishes a link between the instant/immaterial qualities of contemporary urbanism and the slow/material qualities that are the inextricable sign of the rural condition and its life cycles.

 

bottom of page