Thursday 3 May 2012

Y3 Project 3 Urban Control Thesis




Open publication - Free publishing - More architecture


To summarise what i have described in the above document, i mapped the relationship between CCTV and Graffiti within the district of Bromley-By-Bow (or BBB for short) and found, perhaps to no-ones surprise, that graffiti wasn't found within sight of a CCTV camera except by the underground station. It presented as a unique situation within BBB and so a decision was reached that this would be my site for this upcoming project. 


The decision was made on the foundation that it is a unique place within BB because of the relationship between the CCTV and graffiti, and this made an interesting social situation where the people in the area were actively taking a risk in vandalising this area more-so than in other places because of it's high pedestrian and vehicular traffic but also the passive policing that is so prominent in this area. 


A part of the brief for this project was also to create a future scenario for this area, and to work with that scenario. Either by creating a catalyst for change, something which reacts to this change in the future or an architecture which gets absorbed by the change. And my Thesis Document goes through this also which what i am intending to design towards.


It all starts with the local problems which are facing BBB in the present day. Issues such as gentrification [evidence of which i tried to deal with in the Boundaries exercise for Project 1], high immigrant population causing potential unrest and closed communities and for being an area which is comparatively poor. If you add in concerns from the global scene such as the economic crisis, the fuel and energy crisis and even the water problems which are being felt in New Mexico at the moment, there is a big melting pot of concerns which have no obvious resolution. It's not my objective to deal with the resolution of these issues, but to design an architecture taking all of these things into consideration.


My future scenario, not just for BB but for the whole UK, takes inspiration from places like "1984" by George Orwell, the "Black Mirror" series on C4 by Charlie Brooker, "Dune" by Frank Herbert and to a certain extent "Mirror's Edge" produced by EA games. The scenario is as follows:


The world is at a crisis point of resources, this includes food, water, energy [oil, gas, electricity] and also money. In order to stop the situation declining any further, the government has had to take emergency action and control the resource intake of the population, and this has required an increase in electronic monitoring like CCTV. In order to enforce this rationing, areas have been given their own 'Resource Management Station' which is to check on the local populations intake every month and to ensure that people are not living beyond what has been prescribed. 
 However, in BBB, a portion of the population has taken over this site and are using the connections to the main grid of the security system to ensure they are not caught and are forging an existence outside of the governments, now extreme, control. Building up their own living quarters around the 'Resource Management Station' and using the governments own equipment to distort and loop CCTV footage and to forge electronic submissions in order to keep them safe.


So that is the situation i am working with. It's definitely exciting for me to design within a dystopian future scenario which ordinarily i would never be able to. Something which i am keen to explore through process [also being in a process and CAD based unit] within and beyond what i have already learned this year. 








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