COOP COAST is a design & research unit within the graduate diploma school of CSA*. Over the course of the academic year 2010/11 the studio is investigating the political, socioeconomic and spatial realities of coastal towns, both in Kent and across the English Channel. Oscillating between macro and micro scales, between urban and rural, temporal and typological conditions, the studio embraces strategic and activist design practices alike; and will explore the potential for cooperative action within the realms of regional design, programmatic urbanism and performative architecture.

Studio: Pauline Harris, Alasdair McNab, Joao Neves, Sarjay Patel, Benjamin Reay, Sara Resende, Migle Saltynite, Richard Saunders, Rhea Shepherd, Lawrence Sherwood, Hannah Wyatt & Gabor Stark

* Canterbury School of Architecture | University for the Creative Arts. www.cantarch.com

Saturday 4 December 2010

The City's Gray Area







Cities are facing an increasing demographic growth. It is a fact.
Prices of plots in the city are far expensive. Several research and stats point out these urban issues. Steps are being taken towards a more coherent urbanized system. Indeed.
Nevertheless city has different rhythms, composing a dynamic set of rising concrete to its decadence, result from that a whole spread over urban corpses.
Ownership, bureaucracy, politic issues, culprits of their abandoned status.
Places that in nothing contribute for the operative system of the city.
In fact, they are in the limbo, between stating a useless function on the city and some eventual reposition of programme, which may take dozens of years to solve and take place.
The Dirty Reality of the urban vacant lands in the coastal towns. The periodic occupation, the social/economic instability, the post-industrial era.

images: ramsgate, dover, catalogue

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