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Manifesto of The Urban Beach Corridor

Autumn 2016 | Spring 2017
Description

M.Arch Thesis Project | Part I

‘Sous les pavés, la plage’ //

Beneath the paving stones, the beach.’

graffiti from Paris, May '68

 

The phrase was coined by the Situationists as an allusion to the natural, non-utilitarian realm that lies beneath the veneer of capitalism and its infrastructural manifestations in contemporary urbanism.

 

Developing from earlier research, a constructed situation of ‘Pavement Picnic’ attempted to recreate a temporary liminal world of reversals that problematise contemporary social relations and demonstrate the potential for new means of communality. Subsequently, the main research question addresses the lack of a truly public, non-hegemonic realm in the contemporary urban context as a repercussion of increasing commodification of space in the city.

The project adopts the situationists’ social imagining conviction that the city streets, the expression of capital and consumption, could be rediscovered through demolishment of urban infrastructure to reveal the ‘Beach’, an undesignated space. Essentially, the beach is a place of leisure and frivolity, a space for escapism from the everyday normality because of the unique quality of the beach as a liminal landscape; the reverse of an oppressive environment of the city. Heavily informed by a radical methodology inspired by the Situationist International’s experimental techniques, the project explores an alternative form of urbanisation via densification to revert controlled spaces.

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