Urbanism Within Boundaries – Spatial Practices Beyond Extraction

Exploring an alternative urban planning paradigm, how can we reuse existing buildings, infrastructure and landscape to a greater extent, instead of continuing to construct them anew?

During Spring 2023, master students of the Royal Danish Academy’s Urbanism and Societal Change programme tested the hypotheses of an ongoing industrial PhD project, in the suburban landscape of Copenhagen. The PhD project explores alternative urban planning and larger-scale architectural practices within planetary boundaries. It focuses on how to reuse the existing built environment to a greater extent and at a larger scale, to reduce the environmental impacts related to new construction. This exhibit presents the collective work of students in the context of the research project and its relation to spatial practice.

Planning and construction play a critical role in transgressing the ‘environmental boundaries to human activity’ on planet earth. The return to a so-called ‘safe operating space’ (SOS) will require a radical transformation to the way we plan, design and construct our buildings, neighbourhoods and cities. Such a shift fundamentally challenges the existing paradigms of green-field development (taking place on undeveloped land); brown-field development (on former industrial land); and blue-field development (on marine environments).

The reserves amassed in our cities in the form of buildings and infrastructure form a great repository for future urban development. The potential and necessity of making better use of these vast resources is highlighted in several recent studies as well as in the latest IPCC report. However, up until now such practices have been carried out on a small scale, focusing predominantly on components, or individual buildings. In many cases these changes have limited environmental impact, far from the radical shift a return to a SOS implies. Moreover, they fail to take into account the complex and intertwined nature of the built environment, including the infrastructures and landscapes related to buildings.

In light of this, the Spring 2023 semester studio at Urbanism and Societal Change, explores alternative spatial practices for urbanism within boundaries – the boundaries of our planet and the boundaries of the already existing built environment. The aim is to explore and reflect upon how we can accommodate future urban development needs by reusing, retrofitting and recycling the existing building, landscape and infrastructural stocks and how this can contribute to reversing the negative environmental effects caused by decades of expansive and degenerative planning and building practices.

The explorations have been conducted through the lens of various themes, each of which incorporates both dominant practices within current planning and building paradigms (From…) and potential alternatives to these practices (To…).

The physical setting for the assignment is the suburban landscape outside of
Copenhagen. This environment in many ways epitomises the planning and building practices of past several decades. Its urban structures are extensive and exhaustive in their consumption of natural resources such as land, water and raw materials, as well as energy, in their reliance upon private automobility.

This expansive form of decentralised urban development has resulted in an urban landscape that in a number of locations is underutilised or vacant and can be repurposed for new functions and urban contexts. In these terms, the suburban landscape possesses the potential to accommodate radical and impactful transformative interventions, less possible in the urban core, thus serving as a breeding ground for post-carbon building and planning paradigms.

The European suburban landscape can be characterised by a series of ‘archetypical’ typologies (the social housing estate, the industrial zone, the detached housing area, the shopping mall, and so forth) – typologies that are particularly readable in the so called ‘Roskilde finger’. This exhibition presents explorations into the potential for transformation within each of these urban typologies along that finger – each with its own qualities, characteristics and potentials.