Decarboland

Studio Shajay Bhooshan

Tutors Ariadna Lopez, Leo Bieling

Team Sahar Gohari Moghadam, Swati Singh, Yujie Xie, Nivedita Ramachandran

London's present commercial and retail activities are highly centralised, with increased densification in Central London. This results to an unequal urban growth in the future. Even though, according to the 2021 New London Plan, there is an ambition to demarcate town centres in every borough to accommodate local commercial and retail growth, the current governance fails to generate spaces unique to each neighbourhood. This imbalance has further inflated the density of daily commuting to central London for work and commercial purposes, a fact that is largely responsible for the ongoing increase of CO2 emissions in London. 

 As the Covid-19 pandemic reduced such commutes and contributed to a 60% decrease in carbon emissions, the solution to an imbalanced urban densification is decentralising the projected density model. In architectural terms, this includes introducing mixed-use regional hubs in the centre of each borough. 

 Decarboland proposes a regional economic hub in Newham High-Street, focused on satellite commercial and retail markets with headquarters in Central London. Although located in Newham, the proposal functions as a prototype that can be employed in other boroughs of London as well. In Decarboland, the spatial resources get evenly distributed among regional hubs so Londoners can effectively engage with co-workers and collaborators through cyber-physical spaces designed in these new centres while limit the commuting to any central offices to few occasional events. An online game powered by a DAO Mechanism, allows the users to become a part of the decision-making during the design of these spaces. Players can then bid for their plot choices and spatial requirements using a system that promotes social welfare and just pricing. The aim is to achieve maximum profit by reaching a spatial configuration with maximum community value and minimum carbon emissions.