Dust to Dust: Redesigning Urban Life in Healthy Soils

The TU team working in the project Future City has entered successfully the Dust to Dust programme that has been conceived by the academic members and guests of the TruLife network and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (www.dusttodustcompetition.org). 

The team has participated in the charrette and is invited to exhibition at the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts in Norwich in December 2018.

Their proposal is called ‘Subsurface Equilibrium’ and investigates how urban designs can be informed by flows of construction material connected to the subsurface. How would it change urban design if for defined urban samples ‘50s, ‘70s and ‘90s the material flow would reduce and reused? What kinds of typologies, strategies and bottom-up initiatives would emerge?

Subsurface Equilibrium anticipates on the concepts of Zero Land Take and Compact City by focussing on re-use and recycling of the public and private urban construction of the subsurface in existing urban areas. The input from subsurface specialists is used to rethink the urban landscape as a result of synergies between subsurface elements and the (re)design of vital urban infrastructure. In current maintenance and renewal practice new materials are coming in - and waste is put out - of the constructed urban system. These flows are kept by habit and maintenance regimes that are not critically reflected onto. Also, the changing of urban systems is quite hard on investment and behaviour. In this proposal, a method for decision and design is sought to make the material flows visible and to ask ‘what if’ the flows are mapped and reused to keep them inside a defined urban sample. This exploration is done in the Dutch setting, but the basic concept is transferrable and scalable to a range of settings.

More information website: http://www.dusttodustcompetition.org 

Personal contact: f.l.hooimeijer@tudelft.nl