Co-Adaptation 14

Viability

Given further economic development, detail refi nement, and some thoughtful value engineering, this project could be entirely technologically possible.

However, due to current thought processes, design methodologies and legal constructs, it is unviable under the current status quo.
What needs to change in order for liminal space to be dramatically reconceived from waste to opportunity?
One issue is the differentiation between design disciplines and the categorical mindsets that differentiation breeds. This project is not a work of architecture, landscape design, urban planning, agriculture, real estate speculation or civil engineering. Rather it is a confl uence of these disciplines interrelated in a tightly woven and perhaps inextricable way. To begin to think of the built environment as an ecology in dynamic equilibrium rather than as a series of adjacent plots, we must begin to author processes rather than design objects. This frees us from tired debates of style versus substance, utility versus poetics, and ridiculous and false dichotomies between art and science or pure and applied teleogies. It allows us to activate and evaluate built space in a more objective fashion, based on performance and reason, rather than on style or subjective opinion.

The second criteria is notions of ownership. Whether the area in question is owned by the municipality, the government, commercial or private enterprises, the owner must cease to conceive of these sites as their backyard dumping ground and be willing to exploit their potential. This is in no way antithetical to real estate speculation or economic use patterns, rather it is the exact opposite as it opens up new and fertile ground for economic endeavors. This is the ‘waste equals food’ mantra applied spatially. The real estate crisis, coupled with rising costs of transportation and infrastructure means that a more dense urban space model is perhaps more economically sustainable.