Islands of intenCity

Once upon a time there was a city called Rotterdam. A fragmented victim of modernism.

Scientists discovered that the ‘switch effect’ was going to cause the water level to rise by 2 metres within 15 years. The city of Rotterdam accepted this fact by deciding to embrace the water instead of fighting it. This meant flooding the city by 2 m.

The areas spared from the water were picked based upon a combination of population density, building height and historical importance. These locations formed a new set of islands.

The physical shrinking formed a hyper dense city with the same population. The new land forms were based upon the reminders of the 20th century structures.

Result is a new urban fabric of spatial contrast. It consists of isolated spaces, as islands in the physically fragmented landscape and the continuous space of the former elevated high speed infrastructure.

The development of the virtual world as a working environment and the separation of land cause the inhabitants to live and work in the same place as mobility is reduced to a matter of secondary importance.

Water has become the medium for physical mobility. Small scale water vehicles are used for leisure activities and local island-to-island transport. An intricate network of port industries supply the islands with resources.

First life and second life are now fully polarised as the virtual world develops into the space of work and responsibility and public space is used to supply the physical sensations. Temporary platforms ‘thrown’ into the water fulfil urgent space requirements. Lack of space is compensated by intense experience.

Some pieces of old infrastructure remain, as landscape objects rising above the water level. These spaces will receive new functions for support of basic needs and evolve into solar plants, meat fields and urban parks.

The city is reprogrammed to take the new heights into account. Functions are spread throughout the buildings creating a heterogeneous mixture instead of rigid functional separation per island.

Control is achieved in the virtual space, freeing the built environment from the concept of the Panopticon. Freed from these restrictions, architecture will develop a three dimensionally connected city.