This project explores the ways of thinking about hinterlands – territories of production supporting urbanisation processes. It analyses the area of West Macedonia, Greece, which today exists as an energetic landscape. Profit-oriented schemes of capitalism through subordination and functionalization has led to the marginalization of hinterlands and, in the end, will eventually lead to exhaustion.

After 66 years of lignite extraction, the industry is planning to phase out coal combustion. With the economy highly dominated by mining, this decision has had an extensive impact on the region. To understand it, as well as the events that have led to the current state of transition, the essay examines it through temporalities – interwoven timeframes.

The design proposal cuts through various scales, indicating a new direction for the region with a collection of three interventions of different temporalities, scales, and materials, relating back to the context of the place, ecology, socio-economic forces, and the people.
It states that the hinterland should remain in the state of flux, but in a more balanced, and less profit-oriented manner. It embraces the process of the transition, that naturally affects both the environment, as well as the architectural interventions. It focuses on identifying points of intensification, integrating the necessary steps into existing conditions, as well as looking into what change it would bring over a long period of time.
Proposed interventions highlight certain aspects, their influence is acupunctural, highlighting certain moments as points of intensification. By doing this the project touches a particular place at a specific moment, becoming a point of ignition. However, this is the first step. In contrast to the paradigm of speed of the technological acceleration, the effects of future transformation will be slow and subtle, requiring the active and sustained engagement of long-term partnerships between the inhabitants, and public sectors, with much greater attention to various visible and non-visible layers. Therefore, the project is a small gesture that suggests the direction in which the ongoing continuum of the hinterland should evolve. ... Read more

A wall is both a barrier and an opportunity. The ancient walls of Thessaloniki stand as a monument to this. Since their establishment in the 4th century their status and significance in the city has only grown. Thessaloniki was a trading town strategically placed on a hill overlooking the bay below. As it grew, so did the walls with them eventually spanning from the old town down to the bay. The significance of these walls may seem obvious; they protected against military attacks, but this was a rare exception. The true significance of the walls was more related to micro-control; regulating ingress and egress. In its modern context Thessaloniki is no longer a walled city yet walls have and still play a significant role in the spatial development of the city. In this investigation, the dynamic spectrum of spatial outcomes surrounding the city’s boundary conditions are explored revealing the changing cultural dynamics of the city. ... Read more

The architectural design will guide more travelers and pedestrians into the center of the block differently and interestingly, giving the block a chance to revive the previously hidden and poorly run shops and allow travelers to experience residents' lifestyles more deeply. There is a mechanism of gates to protect the privacy and quality of life of residents in the area. These gates will limit the places that passengers can reach in specific periods. This project will be a negotiated boundary between residents and tourists, allowing residents and tourists to have different territories at different periods. ... Read more

This paper looks at the concept of extraction of raw materials, labour and communities, as it applies to the Balochistan province of Pakistan, with an emphasis on the port city of Gwadar. Extraction and its spatial consequences are explored with reference to the situation on the ground in Gwadar. Looking at Gwadar through the lense of statecraft finds it to be a zone/ free zone, but it is also simultaneously an extractive zone. This has spatial and demographic consequences, one of which is the imposition of consecutive master plans which aim to establish this zone. It is found that these plans have a recurrently deferred nature that leaves gaps between the planned infrastructure, the realised infrastructure and the already existing locality. These liminal gaps, of a temporal nature, can be places of opportunity to address the spatial and demographic consequences. ... Read more

The paper investigates the power-relations that define the urbanization of an Extra-Statecraft zone, process them in a phenomenological view of the indigenous people in the case-study of Gwadar, Pakistan. Criticizing the monotonous manner with which the zone Deterritorializes and diminishes existing practices within a context, to argue for the hypothesis that only the symbiosis of smoothness and striation would enrich the landscape, that is otherwise doomed to become a non-place. It raises the concern of the placelessness in recent architecture discourse. ... Read more

In western modern cities there are these spots that still possesses objects of events that where once before. These objects are alienated objects within the modern city, they can take the observer to a place former to them. The topic of the terrain vague got my interest as the leftover of the industrial, within most industrial areas certain parts are redundant due to progression and have been left there to be taken over by nature. Terrain vague, a Term introduced in Anyplaces by Ignasi de Sola-Morales Rubio. (Davidson, 1995). Ignasi de Sola-Morales talks about these spaces as not being colonized by architecture. They are left over spaces or literary translated by its Latin words; vacant terrains. Is this western European term still viable within the context of a condition within the city of Yekaterinburg? What is the Russian terrain vague? How can the understanding of the Russian culture help to redefine the term in a way that it applies to cities where more places have the nature of the vacant place than the one of colonized architecture? Morales explained the terrain vague as a place to escape the city. Can the terrain vague be a place to escape the pressure of the city in a mental space, a space of seclusion? The state of the city resembles the nature of the Russians, an melancholic almost depressing state. But where does this come from and how can this search for the Russian emotion help to better define the Russian terrain vague? Looking at linguistics, the Russian emotion comes much more from the soul. Russian see the emotion much more as a state of the soul someone is in. Can this metal terrain vague express the soul state of the Russians? This depressing nature of the Russian leads to another understanding of the term terrain vague. It is much more within Russian context about a place which can take you away from a bad place. This turns around its premise of something that was un-colonised by capitalism towards a place where there are these archipelagos of freedom from the depression. Which then within Russian context are these capitalist non-places, creating a paradox which result back to the terrain vague that was mentioned by Ignasi de Sola-Morales? ... Read more

This project embraces the latent tensions and conflicts within the mysterious Taklamakan Desert, where cultural history is being rewritten within the contemporary paradigm of surveillance capitalism. By binding the national demand for data centers with the archaeological excavation of destroyed heritage sites, the material and cultural memory of the people remains with a translation to the digital realm, and the forbidden rituals facilitated in a subdued manner to avoid conflict with the larger national agenda. ... Read more

Borders affect both spatial properties and human behaviors. The way people experience spaces determines the thickness of borders, and the thickness is the space of threshold. This architectural concept is inspired by the architectural elements – door which involves a character of connection and separation. The duality of interface challenges the usages and the status of surroundings at different moments. Thus, the research is about how do the thresholds as an architectural concept mediate the spatial properties and people’s movement?

In contemporary cities, there is a way that the constructed buildings allow possibilities to renovate and re-use instead of building a new one in an empty plot. The courtyards are surrounded by the standard apartments which were the results of economic-oriented policy in Russia. They represent self-built lifestyles in the center of the blocks. However, the city is bound to face the issue of demolition because of planning. The site of the project is one of the common blocks in Yekaterinburg which is a grid city with some generic spatial types. The pedestrian streets and the driveways follow the regular grids and affect the way of movement of people.

The manifesto of the city is called The Door City, it conveys the future city will be a city with some small territories which are closer to the living and walking dimension. The project aims to use a topological way, providing a relation of transformation which can be applied to the grids, the courtyards, and the apartments, in Yekaterinburg. Based on the relation, the small territories can be explored into various spatial programs. Thus, the walking routes are generated by the links of the distributed territories, and all involve the ambiance of a dual property. These spaces of the levels of publicness promote diversity, displaying the behaviors without a clear boundary; also function as a blank for the inhabitants to arrange their courtyard. The project concludes with a reflection and a new insight, giving the city another walking culture and transformation on the community scale.
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A project located near to the city of Yekaterinburg in Russia. The design is diving centre in a former talc factory that was in the heart of a industrial town. It builds upon the theory of the liminal transition that also occurs in the sea, where it is called the thermocline. This natural rapid shift in temperature created an in-between state which I explored further as a liminal period. With the design, this liminal experience is physicalized into a diving centre within an old factory on the threshold between a transgressive industrial town and a deserted, now flooded, talc quarry, with the intention to let people learn how to scuba dive before they can experience all the relics on the bottom of the quarry. With the use of materials found on-site, algae that form within the filtration systems of the pools and the structure of the existing factory, the design creates an experience with a mix between artificial and natural and is rather a passing through station then a end destination, therefore staying on the limen, or, treshold. ... Read more

Natural phenomena are continually changing the coastline and sculpting the land in various ways. By surveying these changes a map can be produced of a landscape in flux. But if the landscape is ever changing, what does it tell us about the precision of flux. The essay also tries to give an answer to the question if there can be error in flux or if the essence of flux is made out of error. First it will be introduced by looking at the representability of open source satellite imagery and the intelligence behind the processes they go through. In the process minor errors can appear that can affect our resolution of a place by looking from afar. These errors are tried to make apparent by mapping out three different types of natural phenomena in combination with man made architecture. The topic will be surveyed with the use of a case study surrounding Gwadar, Pakistan. ... Read more

The researched thematic concerns the phenomenon of cross-border smuggling at the mountainous desert region of Balochistan situated in Pakistan. Balochistan is the most precarious province of the country, bordering both with Iran - at the West - and Afghanistan - on the North. The region has been the homeland of the Balochi people, whose territory has once been divided by the Iran-Pakistan frontier. Balochs have been engaged in cross-border smuggling for years, as a result of the province’s economic negligence, lack of developed job market and investments, as well as an effect of massive resource extraction, led by the Pakistani state and China that pursues their New Silk Road. Despite being an extremely dangerous activity, smuggling has become one of few ways to survive in the economic misery of this desertic land and effectively, has created the region’s standalone economy. The Balochs smuggle oil and diesel food, building materials, drugs, and people mainly using their tuned blue pick-ups. However, the most characteristic commodity smuggled in Balochistan that maintains a core of the local economy is oil and diesel.

The research positions itself in a multi-disciplinary scope, deriving not only from spatial domains such as architecture or urbanism but also, even more importantly, from various social sciences such as ethnography, sociology, anthropology, and politics. Hence, the used sources comprise trans-disciplinary works, often operating on the edge of the above disciplines as well as include diverse media types such as books, official reports, online articles, Instagram posts, or YouTube videos.

The crucial part of the research constituted analyzing the physical aspects of the existing Iran-Pakistan border. Having traced the course of the border on satellite images, several places where the border fortifications are disrupted were observed. Most of these disruptions were naturally created by the periodic penetrating the border fortifications. Eventually, the collection of the areas around the border gaps has become a starting set of sites for the design concept. Basing on the locations around the gaps in the border fortifications, the concept envisions model spatial premises, that would enable smugglers to maintain their occupation and reside in their independent cross-border settlements built along the riverbeds. Adapting to the changing perimeter of the periodic river, the design maintains constant self-transformation. Most importantly, however, the complex, labyrinthic structure of these premises, thanks to its quality of obscurity and confusion, is expected to help smugglers avoiding law enforcement forces pursuits, that currently deter them from trading. The project, therefore, spatializes the condition of the ‘hide and seek’ game that is being repeatedly played out by smugglers from both sides of the border and law enforcement forces. The design takes advantage of a great variety of resources available locally - such as mining minerals, bamboo, or clay, mixed with reused left-overs of smuggled commodities such as car particles, solar panels, or oil barrels. Eventually, to accommodate the spatial strategy to the site-specific conditions, the grasshopper script generating instances of labyrinths adapted to the specific gap indicated in the course of the border was created. ... Read more

At present, there are two common ways to understand the impact of industries on the environment. One of them is to abstract statistics from the real industrial pollution scene and base the understanding and decision making on those statistics. The other is to regard the images of industrial landscape as a certain type of aesthetics. Neither of these two perspectives can give us a real insight of what is actually happening around Yekaterinburg, one of the cities in the world most polluted by heavy industry, what the causes are and how they have reshaped the local life. Instead, we need a ‘transcorporeal’ perspective - a term developed by Astrida Neimanis and Rachel Loewen Walker. Being transcorporeal, in her essay, means to go beyond the bifurcations of nature-culture or human-weather opposition, and instead to feel the process of ‘weathering’ where human body interacts intimately with the change of temperature, humidity, sunlight resonating in our skin, veins and nerves, for a better understanding and reaction to climate change. This essay applies and adapts Neimanis’ inspiring theory of transcorporeality to the realm of industrial impacts, because climate change and industrial impacts are similar to each other, in the sense that they can both be seen as the disturbance or damage to the natural environment, where human activity has played the main role combined with the feedbacks from the ecosystem, and in return has influenced the living conditions of people. With this ‘transcorporeal’ perspective, we might truly internalize the industrial impact on the environment, and even help us be critical about our moves towards the industrial impacts. ... Read more