Poulsom Middlehurst were delighted to exhibit as part of ARENA’s Re-imagining Rurality conference at the University of Westminster.
We also enjoyed discovering a plethora of fresh ideas and strategic approaches during the conference, including intelligent infrastructure from Joshua Balchover of RUF (Rural Urban Framework) in Hong Kong, and Elke Vanempten’s Productive Landscape Pilot Projects at the Bouwmeetser in Flanders to name a few.
Our proposal took the vicinity of Queen’s Road Peckham as a test site, where we proposed an alternative development path for the area. It is somewhere whose identity is not static; as is the case with so many inner London settlements today; we wanted to understand better the drivers that bring about ‘urban’ or ‘rural’, and what defines the in-between.
Future Ex-Urban is a challenge to the current prototypical development path within London, where we propose an eventual inversion of intrinsic typological characters. Rural becomes the colonizer and urban the colonized; by repurposing existing urban infrastructure to enable rural networks and flows in the city, to produce a series of new contemporary ruralities.