MetaboliCity

MetaboliCity is the name for a radical vision of a city that metabolizes its resources and waste to supply its inhabitants with all the nourishment they need and more.

This one-year (October 2008 – September 2009) participatory design research project on urban agriculture is based at Central Saint Martins, School of Art and Design and was funded by the Audi Design Foundation.The initial one year phase was a design seeding process that brought together specialist and amateur communities to co-design a diverse and highly innovative portfolio of solutions for growing food in the city.The aim of the project was to develop a co-design framework and methodology for urban transformation and green place-making as well as test an urban craft Grow-Kit. It was implemented at four diverse case-study sites in London, UK. Each site explored an emerging new role for design in amateur urban agriculture with communities from a restaurant, community centre, office space and social housing context. The project was facilitated by a multidisciplinary design and research team with the participation of over 100 people from eco-architects, hydroponic experts to chefs and community growers.

The project questioned:

1. How can we grow food sustainability in urban spaces with limited resources, and how can design thinking facilitate such a production?

2. What is the role of the designer in agricultural initiatives? How can design be used to generate local participation and engagement with urban spaces?

3. How can a communication platform for experts and non-experts be created to share best practice, disseminate information and network with a wider community engaged with urban agriculture?

4. How do people experience the role of technology and innovation in the context of ecology and agriculture?

A strategic and systemic approach was adopted to design by creating a large-scale awareness in the general public about localized food production. From the life-cycle evaluation of each of the participating sites, to the crafting and constructing of the Grow-Kits; and from the urban space design to the facilitation of participatory processes, design intervenes at many different levels of society, ecology, economy and culture to synergise a bespoke design service system that supports diverse amateur cultures of food production. The participatory nature of the project was informed by the notion of ‘Citizen Science’ (Irwin, 1995), where amateurs and specialists are engaged in a non-hierarchical process. The project explores how designers can work in multiple ways, taking on different roles within an interdisciplinary context, mediating between experts and amateurs in the field of urban agriculture. The role of the designers is to cultivate shared processes of envisioning, weaving and growing within each of these local contexts.

Metadesign & participatory methods:

The participatory framework of the project introduced methods and processes to each community group from 1) Imagining and Visioning, 2) Space Design, 3) Crafting and Making, 4) Planting and Tending, 5) Observing and Recording to 6) Harvesting and Sharing.The complex nature of the project called for a Metadesign approach. Metadesign can be described as ‘a shared design endeavour aimed at sustaining emergence, evolution and adaptation’. It creates ‘open-ended and infinite interactivity capable of accommodating always-new variables’. (Giaccardi, 2005). MetaboliCity tested and adapted collaborative tools and processes that have been developed as a part of the ‘Benchmarking Synergy Levels within Metadesign’, AHRC funded research project, at Goldsmiths, University of London (2005-2008).

Urban Interventions:

The spatial intervention at each site employs a new method to construct space that combines traditional lace making with advanced geometry and material science. The complex geometries form a scaffold for plants to grow into creating living, biological spaces that can be integrated into the built environment.This is a strong, lightweight structural system wherein circular elements are tangentially joined. The system is simple, expandable, modular and also scalable from molecular through to architectural levels. There is a large potential for this system in the context of urban design and architecture, particularly architectural textiles that are structural and self-supporting. The technique also allows one to construct very complex topologies using only a small number of parts, which aids the understanding of form and enables a conversation about structure across different fields of art and science. One of the core advantages of this building technique is the ability to construct any imaginable surface from a small number of lightweight parts. Recently discovered structures that were previously unbuildable can easily be fabricated by hand using this modular, curvilinear approach. This technique developed by design studio Loop.pH was shared with the participants and formed a major part of the Grow-Kit.

MetaboliCity has created a network of small-scale, distributed growing experiments that each developed solutions to integrate both traditional and hi-tech agricultural techniques into the fabric of the built environment. Some of the design solutions included soilless, solar powered window farms, vertical green cladding retro-fit to facades or organically grown vegetables climbing up street lamps. Innovative solutions emerged from multidisciplinary teams collaborating. 

Design can be said to hold the potential to address some of today’s most urgent societal and ecological problems by facilitating creative visioning, encouraging action and promoting energy independence, human nutrition, and a metabolic thinking.

Special thanks to participating groups from Fifteen, Shoreditch Trust, Haberdasher Estate, nfpSynergy and St Lukes Community Centre. Thank you to the Audi Design Foundation for supporting phase one of the project, General Hydroponics Europe and Growing Life, London for in-kind support with all hydroponic growing and Loop.pH for supplying the BioLoops growing system.