Secondary resources in architecture

The aim of this research is to explore to what extend architecture can give response to our contemporary environmental overspending. The research will illustrate at the scale of a neighborhood how natural metabolism can be transformed into a technical metabolism, pursuing to implement industrial ecology in a given urban area.
This research is multifaceted and takes its departure in secondary resources of the Anthropocene. The environmental speculation is combined with the application of low emission strategies and the integration of resources provided by human beings living in a housing area of the 70s considered a ghetto. By mapping the three factors; secondary resources, low emission strategies and suggested integration of human resources, a qualified analysis will validate potentials and a row of design parameters. These potentials and parameters will constitute the background of the program for an architectural project.
Inquiries on how the specific technical resource streams may flow in circular loops are used as a design driver. Focus is put on new sustainable business models. Through the process several questions are formulated: What if society saw the potentials of waste as a resource for development? What can careful extraction and cleaned industrial building resources offer of quality to our urban areas? What if the society´s new urban mined and secondary resources could save primary resources for our future? What if these activities offered normal working possibilities for the excluded human resources? Integration of secondary resources narrates aesthetics and identity at a local place.
The chosen case project illustrate a context-related architectural design, which reflects the history of our society´s conglomerate and expresses a built environmental diversity shaped as an architectural patchwork and offering a holistic and social proposal for local businesses and new common facilities for the housing area.
The research methodology is influenced by the specific Problem Based Learning (PBL), which establishes a fundamental architectural working methodology. The essay will exemplify the research methodology by the following stages: firstly, an investigation of ´industrial ecology´; secondly, the development of business models links contextual resource streams; thirdly, the architectural design results from an iterative working process and finally, the analysis and results intend to show new ways of anticipating the inclusive resource management of the Anthropocene.