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Project

RAPID REGIONAL TRANSFORMATION – URBANISATION TOWARDS CIRCULARITY. SOFIA EU

Infrastructure networks developed in the 19th and 20th centuries continue to structure entire urban areas and hinterland territories at a macro level, but they become redundant or inadapted to the new “post-growth” challenges. A new strategic spatial framework is necessary, one which is based on the regions’ ecological and metabolic systems, ensures the environmental and economic resilience of a territory, allowing it to adapt to a wide range of practical circumstances and diverse economic scenarios. In the effort to achieve rapid regional transformation and adapt to the challenges of global warming, there is a question as to how infrastructure networks (old and new) can be reinvisioned as metabolic spatial structures to become a backbone of the post-growth landscape? The unique geography of the metropolitan Sofia region is an apt case study. Its urbanized territory is cut through its length by an east-west corridor of unused railway lands (currently a ruderal landscape) crossed north-south by six different rivers. These natural and human-made entanglements frame a unique opportunity to link metabolic flows and ecosystems. The geographical space and designed ecologies & networks, importantly could link to issues of energy transition, adaptive infrastructures, socio-economic development, and engagement with urban inequalities. This design-based action research will study and create potential strategies as a means to rethink post-industrial heritage and address the vast regenerative territories in the context of new urban circular economies. It will iteratively test urbanism strategies for Sofia which envelop the theoretical domains of adaptive landscape urbanism, infrastructural barriers and territorial metabolism. Amongst the research questions are: What kind of new metabolic infrastructure and new spatial framework could be developed on vacant railway sites to render urban metabolism of the city more circular? Borrowing on Lewis Mumford vocabulary, can redundant monotechnic infrastructures unfold into polytechnic or even biotechnical infrastructures in order to address the current urban challenges? Emphasizing the resourcefulness of the territory itself and examining how railway infrastructures impact ecology, the study will search for the missing links between the physical environmental ecosystems present in the landscape and the old & new metabolic infrastructure networks.

Date:1 Feb 2023 →  Today
Keywords:circular urban development, adaptive infrastructure, territorial metabolism
Disciplines:Urbanism and regional planning
Project type:PhD project