Amplifying trajectories

Amplifying trajectories: in the marginal settlements of Mashhad

Meijer, Allard (TU Delft Architecture and the Built Environment)

Schoonderbeek, M.G.H. (mentor)
Geerts, F. (mentor)
Koskamp, G. (mentor)
Sanaan Bensi, N. (mentor)

Delft University of Technology

2021-07-07

In Mashhad, one million - a third of the people - live in marginal settlements also known as slums. Migrations from the countryside and Afghanistan to Mashhad, and housing crisis have pushed many to settle in the literal margins of the city. However, their life is everything but settled: their existence can instead be characterized as a nomadic condition in which they are always on the go. Flexibility, informality and trajectories are essential to their survival within the precarious and marginal settlements. The marginal settlers have to manoeuvre between scarcities such as employment, food, water and sanitation. Those scarcities are constantly changing and thus the daily trajectories of the marginal settlers do so too. Moreover, marginal settlers live this way in areas that are marginalized in a multitude of senses: geographically, economically, politically, socially, architecturally and environmentally. Natural hazards, low employment, administrative borders, little education, poor quality housing, and an environment of waste and lack of waste management all contribute to the daily conditions of the marginal settler.

Very often, when similar poor conditions are faced by design, attention goes to the betterment of housing or creation of community centers. They are however striated or approaches, thinking from a city-point of view: to try to fit the
marginal settlements within the organizations of the city. This project seeks for the opposite approach:

The project intents to improve the marginal state of Mashhad's marginal settlements whilst being focused on life in transit. The project addresses trajectories and intersections and intents to embrace, amplify and take inspiration from the nomadic lifestyle. Its use is intended to be of democratic and public nature, ready to be taken over and adapted by the marginal settlers themselves.

This approach can be more feasible than changing the lifestyle of a third of the city’s people. The design task is first to create social facilities that provide basic needs that are absent in the marginal settlements along the daily trajectories of marginal settlers and secondly an integration of those social facilities in a new waste management network, which creates employment and cleans the environment from waste upon which trajectories move. This integration draws people towards the site where they are made aware of the importance and benefits of waste recycling, and in return for waste receive services along their daily trajectories.

Trajectories
Marginal settlements
Mashhad
Recycling
Social facilities

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:bd2df39c-73f4-450a-86ef-bd598d3f7633

36.31863318501295,59.63991785912958

Student theses

master thesis

© 2021 Allard Meijer