Slowtown

Unit 2 AA Summerschool with Zoë Quick & Chrysanthe Staikopoulou

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The site for your challenge: The Thames Gateway, currently in thrall to the government’s proposals for the construction of 120,000 homes with associated transport links, schools and hospitals by 2016. Here on the periphery of the city, village communities, wildlife, trade and industry coexist in space and time, each contributing their own times and speeds to a ‘time territory’ which is underpinned by the tidal flow of the river itself. The city flows from its centre to this periphery in ‘river-time’ as it has done for millenia, but as more immediate channels of flow between the two have evolved, the city now threatens to engulf this site in its impatient thirst for space and time. Contemporary urban development is procured at breakneck speed – As the city speeds up, so it grows, and at an ever faster rate – urban development is procured nowadays at breakneck speed – What will this mean for the this site, its inhabitants and its inherent ‘time’? A number of full-scale catalyst elements start to describe a new form of urbanism, slow, adaptable and responsive.