PARTI-CITIES

Studio Shajay Bhooshan

Tutor Ariadna Lopez

Consultant Andy Watts

Team Jamil Al Bardawil, Yara Manla, Cheolyoung Park, Pin-Ju Wang

Urbanisation is a catalyst for inducing human encounters, sparking ideas for innovative solutions, and creating enticing environments for start-ups to seed and grow. However, the same process also generates issues such as scarcity in space, high living costs and rigid space use, excluding the innovative forces from contributing to urban generation. In PARTI-CITIES, we propose a cyber-physical participatory platform where the innovative start-ups are leveraged as the driving forces of urban transformation, a system where crowd consensus of community and start-ups are digitally rehearsed, customised, and materialised in urban agglomerations.  

Within the post pandemic London urban context, several issues became relevant, such as the mismatch between soaring vacancy and high global investments, the need for transforming the dominant live-work paradigms, and a call to revive the public activities taking place in city centres. In our proposal, these issues become opportunities to empower start-ups and the community. We provide spatial adaptability and customisability to start-ups to repurpose vacant spaces and face future uncertainties with resilience. We enable cyber-physical duality to reflect the paradigm shift and enhance the live-work flexibility, social outreach, and global fund attraction. And we utilise urban pedestrianisation strategies to revive public activities and engagement, by supporting start-ups to sustain in city centres and fuel urban transformation. 

To implement the system, three major aspects are required. First is constructing a community-centred platform to reach crowd consensus, a platform where users can socialise, collaborate, and invest in space and program creation in a real-time participatory manner. Second is providing direct participatory agency to the users via tools of decentralised finance, such as cryptocurrency, smart contracts, and space registered NFTs. Third is creating a geometry system that allows for digital negotiation in the platform. These geometries should respond to structural and material efficiency, mass customisability and spatial properties. PARTI-CITIES is an urban regeneration system that leverages start-up innovations to fuel urban transformation, that gravitates towards citizen-centric requirements through digital mass negotiation and provides adaptive architectural solutions through digitally and structurally informed geometries.