in(ter)dependence: Achieving Localised Self-Sufficiency in Future Urban Environments while Enhancing Biodiversity and Interspecies Co-Existence

Abstract

in(ter)dependence is a design-based research project that explores how architecture and architectural systems can support urban agricultural self-sufficiency in urban fabrics. The project aims to develop an agroecological architecture that is sensitive to Indigenous knowledge and practices, that builds local food systems, economies and more-than-human communities. This project seeks to pivot from dependence on the current harmful industrial food system, instead empowering a distributed, context-responsive and ecological approach. This project also acknowledges that a shift in societal ontology is required to achieve this vision, and therefore addresses this shift through an architectural intervention.

Situated in a future beyond our present day, this project intervenes in a world suffering from the impacts of anthropogenic climate change, extensive biodiversity loss and widespread social inequities. Intervening at the precipice of societal change, in(ter)dependence catalyses the shift from the Anthropocene to the Ecocene, through shifting the socio-political ontology from capital-centric to agroecological kinship. This project intervenes within the urban fabric and ultimately seeks to disestablish dependence on our broken commercialised food system. Instead, empowering a distributed, context-responsive approach through the establishment of interventions – architectural and otherwise – that support flaxroots agroecological initiatives and later the establishment of a central node in this web, the Memorial to the Sixth Mass Extinction. This will be achieved by implementing tactful and strategic modes of engaging with vacancy, food production, and generalised public ontology. This distributed approach not only increases accessibility but also empowers human communities to connect with food production and value the intrinsic interdependencies shared with more-than-humans. Located within Tāmaki Makaurau the project focuses its intervention on the suburb of Māngere. Interrogation of the wider site vernacular distilled two core typologies: the mound, or maunga, and the glasshouse. These typologies are investigated to reveal their distinct and definitive characteristics, resulting in the programmes of their architecturalisation. For the mound aspect, these programme(s) stem from the notions of the underground, germination, solemness, and latent potential. For the glasshouse, the programme embodies notions of efficient productivity and a lively, lightweight structure full of light.

The programmes contained within the mound are concerned with seeding change. The mound houses a literal seed bank for the surrounding communities and region alongside the facilities to extract and cure these seeds. At a relational transformational level, the mound embraces the Memorial to the Sixth Mass Extinction – a memorial to the significant losses incurred throughout the Anthropocene. The memorial aims to spatialise generalised grief and mourning surrounding the current ecocide, and acknowledge the harm inflicted by industrialised civilisation, before pivoting toward an eco-relational sensibility. This is delivered through the arrival at the ‘glasshouse’, an architecture that rises from the earth, simultaneously piercing and disappearing within in the skyline. The architecture resembles that of the hakari, a performative skeletal structure that hosted celebratory feasts (Treadwell, 1999; A. Yates, 2010), and in this instance celebrates, supports, and enables the surrounding agroecological food system.