City Circular

Abstract

The current spatial models and construction practices of architecture and city-making have a violent appetite. Linear resource consumption patterns, coupled with a rapidly increasing urban population, has pushed the planet to its ecological boundary. Although spatial designers have made massive leaps in the performance and energy efficiency of the interventions they design and construct, being “less bad” on the environment is simply not good enough. We need a radical change in the way we design and construct our cities to change the current trajectory of the urban environment. We need a new spatial model, a model that is built on regenerative principles to counteract the historical linear model of consumption and waste.

This dissertation investigates circular economics as a possible answer to the linear model of resource consumption. With the elimination of waste and the closing of resource loops at the core of circular thinking, circularity within design manifests as a “whole-system-thinking” response, a response that has been compared to that of a human metabolism. In the spatial design discourse, Urban Metabolism has been very helpful to understand and unpack the interplay between various resource flows and systems within the urban environment. Using circularity and urban metabolic thinking, we can identify systems and resource flows that can be closed through a design response. Closed-looped resources systems aid in the regeneration of our natural environment and lead to resilience with the urban community.

Mamelodi, a community plagued with vulnerability due to past injustices and current spatial isolation from economic opportunity, requires intervention to break the cycle of poverty and aid in developing cultural economic resilience. This dissertation, through the lens of circularity and urban metabolic thinking, identifies untapped resources within the community of Mamelodi that can lead to cultural-economic resilience. The programme, a closed-loop resource production facility, along with complimentary programmes of education and skills development facility, facilitates upward mobility within the community to aid in breaking the cycle of poverty. To counteract the linear model of consumption within South African construction practices, this dissertation adopts a prefabricated mass timber construction methodology. In combination with the carbon sequestering properties of mass timber, this dissertation utilizes low embodied carbon construction methods, such as locally manufactured adobe brick, to develop a regenerative spatial model.