Urban design project one – Gas stations and the infrastructure of care

Tutor: Dr Iulia Statica

Teaching Assistant: Sergio Poco Aguilar

Excerpt from the studio brief: The studio explores the intersections between ecology and domesticity in the urban, political and environmental context of Sheffield. It engages with contemporary notions of migration, networks of care and domestic infrastructures and their effects and potential to structure urban ecologies.

The studio's main focus is the networks of migration that are established within the city of Sheffield both formally and informally, and their relation to the wider urban infrastructures of care such as food provision and domesticity. The studio takes as points of departure Sheffield's status as a 'city of sanctuary' since 2007, being the first UK city to have joined the Gateway Protection Programme – a partnership with United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Darling, 2010).

The studio will engage with two narratives of migration. Firstly, and from a historical perspective, the studio will explore the ways in which we may articulate an intergenerational memory of migration, in relation to which descendants of migrants experience their cultures of origin as home, despite being born and raised in Sheffield. Secondly, the focus of the studio extends also to the urgent, contemporary situation in which the city is receiving or preparing to receive migrants as a result of global processes of human flows.

Approaching the question of ecology from its etymological sense – oikos – that is the household where 'interactions and encounters take place' (Herzogenarth, 2009), the studio will explore how existing and potential infrastructures of care operate, in order to imagine possible futures for the city of Sheffield. Introducing critical concepts, methods and strategies, the studio aims to interrogate and understand present issues of local urban environments in their relation to global processes in order to articulate possible design responses.

Globalite-localite

Group one: Maoqin Ma, Lakshmi, Yuqing Zheng, Zicheng Wang.

Globalite-localite map of Wicker and Burngreave.

Cultural nostalgia for a hometown

Group two: Sneha Khulge, Jialin Zhang, Qiru Zhong, Dianni Yang, Ning Cui.

Precinct study map with notes on particular buildings and locations.

Urban farming

Group three: Chen Zhang, Fenglin Zhang, Hegang Jiang, Menglun Wu, Bolin Xu.

Map showing site categories and issues.