2007-2008

Katya Larina

The project aim was to elaborate ‘protostrategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations, as a way of critically addressing the phenomenon of mass-produced sprawl urbanisation in the Pearl River Delta region, China.
The project uses the capacity of the rural self-industrialisation process, so-called TVE (Town Village Enterprise), as an instrument to form new urban tissue. In a context of such complex and dynamic process the urban model has to be spatially and programmatically readjustable.
The new flexible mode of urban development is going to happen by means of the introduction of self-sufficient urban clusters, which attach to the villages and contain a combination of plots with residential and manufacturing programmes.
The specificity of a material organisation of the cluster is an effect of hybridising the green engineering infrastructure with social and public services within one loop structure; this structure represents a backbone of each urban cluster and shares water, energy, and social resources between the different programmes of a cluster. Complex social and environmental data analysis allows spatial and programmatic elements to be built-in to the proposal within the dynamic context of industrial sprawl. The main design algorithm of the project allows for the simulation of diverse scenarios of urban development and for finding the right strategy for the preferable result. In the simulation of urban growth of the agglomeration within clusters, the important factors are the relations of the time of their appearance and the strategy applied to each cluster.
The combination of programmes within each cluster is dependent upon the programs in adjacent clusters and the current stage of industrialisation of the adjacent villages. Thus the overall level of industrialisation of territory changes instantly, generating a timeline where the spatial character of each of the clusters is affected by its programmatic filling.