MArch_DS12

Studio Brief: Desakota “desa”: village “kota”: city An experimental village which uses and develops new eco-friendly methods and technologies in agriculture and industry and domestic life. This year we imagined and designed alternative programmes for the approximately square kilometres of territory earmarked to become the third runway for Heathrow airport. At present this area, to the north and west of the airport, comprises a complex mixture of old villages, logistics infrastructure, farms, wilderness, gravel pits, landfill sites, cement works and more. People who live there have been living with uncertainty for many years now. Our plan envisages new environmentally friendly industries and ways of life for this very contested space other than airport expansion. Questions: where should the stuff we consume come from? How should cities relate to the country? What might productive villages look like in the future? Our brief asked everyone in the studio to identify a different site within the area and to develop a distinct programme for it. Each project includes different kinds of agriculture, industry and housing. While everyone’s individual projects are distinct, relations between them and with the neighbourhood are co-ordinated to some degree too. So together they form a hybrid cluster of interacting projects within an already complex territory. It is the result of individual imaginations, but also a lot of creative negotiation and group design. On our first site visit we went to see the Grow Heathrow settlement and Harmondsworth Great Barn, both of these places raised profound questions for us about settlement formation and their influence is there in some of our designs. We used the word ‘desakota’ because of the way it brings together the idea of the village and the city and thus connects different scales. This project is dedicated to the memory of the recently evicted Grow Heathrow camp. Year 1: Xinran Li Peter Runham Rukhsar Zahid Year 2 Andrea Antoniou Callum Bleasdale Isabel Briggs Thomas Burbery Anissa Colaco Souza April Glasby Aleksandra Gutkowska Eliza Hague Kin Leung Rishi Krishan Mistry Arshana Rajaratnam Chung (Paul) Shu Wing Joshua Spitter Renzhi Zeng