Desakota
“desa”: village
“kota”: city
This year’s site will be the contested territory which was destined to become a 3rd runway for Heathrow airport until this year when a) the appeal court deemed the project to be in contravention of the UK’s climate commitments and b) Coronavirus decimated the airline industry. This rural-urban territory is at the intersection of multiple political, economic, social, industrial, ecological and geological processes of varying scales and time frames. In amongst all this, we’ll take on the idea of the productive village as a site of modernity where new ecologically minded industries, agriculture and ways of life can emerge and interact.
An experimental village which uses and develops new eco-friendly methods and technologies in agriculture and industry and domestic life.
One of our starting points will be to find out who owns the land in this area; how much has been bought by the airport? what if they decided to sell? Could the construction of new settlement forms be funded through something like crowd sourcing, co-operatives or community share schemes? We’ll ask you to work with ideas of community or public ownership and funding in your design process.
More people are working from home and moving out of cities and buildings and spaces of all kinds are being re-programmed as society alters as a result of the virus. In the vicinities of big airports like Heathrow people face the added pressures of air industry redundancies. In these pressurised circumstances we’ll be asking you to re-think the home, the village, the city and the country according to the major changes taking place.
DesignStudioTwelve. 