Insular urbanities
L.A.H.A. Bernard de Saint Affrique (TU Delft - Architecture and the Built Environment)
R. Cavallo – Mentor (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
M.G.A.D. Harteveld – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Urban Design)
M. Parravicini – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Building Product Innovation)
AS Alkan – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Theory, Territories & Transitions)
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Abstract
Every human being is driven towards creating its own bubble, self-contained worlds, islands. It can be equally seen on the urban level where this insular condition is a proliferating phenomenon. The contemporary city is characterized by the widespread propension of certain metropolitan fragments to detach themselves from their continuum of the city. Driven by the increasing dependency on logistics, this condition becomes a globalized urban form. It tends to become the privileged form of spatial organization in the contemporary city. Ports being its most accomplished version, by their monumentality, radicality and juxtaposition with the city. They tend to become territorial exceptions, ground exceptions, urbanization exceptions, time exceptions and legal exceptions at the heart of the city.
This is particularly visible in the cities neighbouring the port of Pireas, that has for some years been the site of an impressive transformation since the port was acquired by the Chinese. Since then, the port grows exponentially with the ambition to become the main commercial door to Europe for Asian importations. To accommodate ever more docks, the port progressively cannibalizes any available coastline. Gradually, the city finds itself encapsulated, trapped and asphyxiated by a large infrastructural barrier, without any access to the sea. The ports, supposed to be windows on the worlds become constrictive elements. The city of islands is at risk of becoming a city of conflicts. We need to find ways of diffusing that tension.
This project suggests an aggressive welcome to the urban condition created by the port while proposing to reclaim Pireas’ relationship with the seaboard. As the waterfront of the cities is turning into an infrastructural product, the new boardwalks may become perpendicular lines. This project investigates this hypothesis. It thus proposes a perforation through the infrastructural barrier from town to sea in an underused interstitial space of the port. It invites us to re-imagine the spatial relationships between architecture, landscape, energy and infrastructure in ports.