The project explores the idea of protest as a construct of architecture, and the tension of threshold spaces. It is driven by economic and
political issues and is intended as a critique of consumerism and the kind of insatiable capitalistic thirst described by Mike Davis (1999).
An initial study into the void spaces of Birmingham’s ‘Southern Gateway’ has opened up the idea of Eutopia (literally ‘no place’) and how this could be reappropriated as a ‘shadow city’. Reading of Guattari (2000) has led to an investigation into how the existing skill-set of the labour force in Birmingham could be reappropriated leading to a new ‘creationist subjectivity’.
The project imagines a future scenario in the context of an ever-worsening jobs recession, the collapse of the European currency, and an increasingly polarised society. As global unrest escalates, the Occupy movement gains momentum and a nascent community forms, which relies on illegal occupation of the Southern Gateway’s voids (once set for redevelopment under the Big City Plan).
The threshold between the Bullring Shopping Centre and the site of the now demolished wholesale markets develops into a ‘soapbox’ area: A space for occupants of the shadow city to petition for their community to be acknowledged as a legitimate form of urban development.
With increasing ‘third-worldization’ of the UK, as seen with the squatter ‘cities’ of the developing world, in the absence of any alternative solution to homelessness and unemployment, the authorities are left will little alternative but to allow the Occupiers to remain and for a shadow city, with its own systems, infrastructure and economy, to develop.
David, M. (1999) City of Quartz, Pimlico: London.
Newirth, R. (2005) Shadow Cities, Routledge: London.
Guattari, F. (2000) The Three Ecologies, London: Continuum Publishing, p41.
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