Studio 1 - Where The Wild Things Live
Project Brief
The Studio design thesis is a 3 part studio project, taking place over the course of the final year of the masters degree. In SKN, this project was done as part of a pair, working with Amanda Lim Studio 1 covers a conceptual masterplan for the re-development of Manchester in such a way that it aligns with the SKN Agenda of decentring humans and tackling climate and biodiversity crises. For our thesis we investigated "How can we apply the Nodes and Corridors approach to counter habitat fragmentation in Bradford (Manchester) and the wider context?".
Methodology
We embark on a journey through the eyes of a beast, exploring the urban context from the perspective of more than the human. We sought to understand the non-human’s needs, habits and movements through research and a series of exercises carried out throughout the project. One of the main methods employed in this project was secondary data collection, referencing council documents, strategies, existing datasets, research papers and books. In addition, other methods including sketching, physical mapping exercises and model making were used in the development process. We apply this non-human perspective to an urban masterplan, designing a blanket approach scheme to encourage the transformation of urban spaces to include nature as a primary benefactor.
Identifying Ecology Nodes and Corridors
To approach the masterplan nodes and corridors, we first had to define what a node or corridor looks like to an animal, so we made use of an online resource, the NBN Atlas (https://nbnatlas.org/) to identify clusters of recorded observations of different species. We identified clusters as wildlife nodes, and areas without any observations as 'Dead Zones' for nature. We then undertook an activity called "Being a beast", based on literature by Charles Foster (Being a Beast, 2016) where we envisioned how cities are traversed from the perspectives of different species, and through this exploration identified how the species would connect between the wildlife nodes. We then went through a process of aligning these corridors with existing road infrastructure, to designate as our proposed wildlife corridors to place our interventions.
Image credit : Amanda Lim
Corridor Interventions
Throughout the proposed corridors, a series of installations were to be placed supporting the species in the interim period for natural succession to take over the existing urban space. The interventions are tailored with co-habitation of humans and non-humans in mind, and provided for a variety of species needs adapting to the type of wildlife that would use them, for instance along canals and rivers, the installation would provide sloped and sheltered access directly into the water for amphibians and insects, whilst bird towers provided safe roosting options around the city.
Ecology Nodes and Nature Corridors
The Masterplan we detail in our portfolio represents a re-wilding and pedestrianisation scheme proposal across Manchester, with the goals to reduce the impact of highways on fragmentation by pedestrianizing areas and dedicating these as nature corridors, proposing a city wide elevated rail to replace the removed infrastructure.
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Along the nature corridors there would be a series of architectural interventions design to provide refuge and entanglement between nature and humans, to improve the quality of biodiversity across the city, as well as major re-wilding schemes to allow for natural succession of the city, where plants reclaim areas as habitat spaces. Reduction of cars and roads will improve the quality and connectivity of habitats as well as safety of species in them, whilst also cutting Manchester's carbon emissions in key nodes.
Image credit : Amanda Lim
