Depraved Urban Scapes: Inhabiting Subnature in the Hybrid City

Abstract

The aim of this design report is to investigate, both on a theoretical and a practical context, ways of redefining and inverting the negative sense of contemporary depraved (de-pravus [Latin]: perverted, corrupted) urban spaces through the convergence of media in contemporary metropolitan centers. Gissen (2008) refers to those spaces as subnaturai, or as "postindustrial urban spaces characterized by seemingly subhuman conditions of living". This project consists in its core approach of transforming the relationship between architecture and pollution from "one which architecture is wholly regarded as a means of separation from a noxious external environment to one of interaction" (Gissen, 2010). The redefinition of urban toxicity in the media city can be detected in various scales, from the urban to the architectural and to the detailed material one. Data driven computational protocols of urban intervention, ubiquitous digital networks and algorithms digitilising natural laws, attempt to bridge the wide gap between these scales and generate self-adaptive and self-sustained structures according to the needs of the urban context within which they are developed. As a result, the intersection of digital and urban infrastructure, contributes in the configuration of a new spatial milieu depicting the core of the contemporary hybrid city, through rendering the space that we avoid inhabiting to the space that could potentially regenerate the city. Moreover, this inverted urban approach defines subnatural elements (Gissen, 2009), or the so-called "anxious landscapes" (Picon, 2000) of the urban centers not as a threat but as a dynamic element of potential design inspiration. The expected outcome is the establishment of a new urban aesthetic and a new way of perceiving space, while producing topological geometries that are configured under the adaptive and fluid interrelation developed between growth and form.