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This project addresses the potential future of Manhattan in a world struggling to cope with the new reality caused by a warmer planet. In this crisis scenario, the island of Manhattan will not only become directly impacted by rising waters, but its current economic, demographic and social components will suffer dramatic shifts. In a world confronted with desertification, mass migration, food shortage, and an ever-increasing need for energy independence, Manhattan will survive only as a ruin, a place where new populations may start again.

The project proposes the construction of a new infrastructural layer woven into the Manhattan grid by allowing the surrounding waters to enter the city. The new layer - a vast network of canals duplicating the street grid - will perform a series of functions throughout the life of city's reconstruction and rehabilitation. On one hand, the canals will handle water overflow from rising tides. As the waters rise, the canals' walls will continue to be built up, transforming the new layer into a multistory infrastructural network. On the other hand, the canals will weave into the city a new ecological plateau capable to feed into the energy flows of the island. Intimately linked with existing infrastructural networks and desalination filters, the new waterscape will be used for transportation, fishing, algae production, irrigation, hydropower, waste management, and water recycling via artificial wetlands constructed in city’s parks.

Although it connects the entire island by water, the canal grid will also act as a segregator, allowing each block to develop independently as a self-sustaining island. Here, new ways of building become linked to novel social practices and organic processes. The relative isolation of city blocks encourages the formation of new communities as alternate societies capable to address environmental issues and energy needs in ways specific to each block's built configuration. Each island is conceived as a laboratory aimed at becoming an off-grid self-sustaining unit. In this process of ruin appropriation and boundary negotiation, a new urban vernacular based on permanent invention and adaptation arises.

The newly created meshwork of self-sustaining islands is only the starting point of a new city. In time, through trade and negotiation, novel social, economic and political practices will continually generate new means of spatial connectivity between blocks. In this process, the layered logic of the city’s ruins will provide varying plateaus for production of spaces.

At the lowest level, a new city will gradually emerge as trade paths are being formed between adjacent island-blocks. These paths will originate in multiple points across Manhattan and grow into a rhizomic network of carved streets and bridges. Its intricate structure will expose one of Manhattan’s hidden cities: the medieval metropolis. At median level, a third plateau emerges as roofs become gradually converted into food gardens. Initially serving each block’s individual needs and fed off by the surrounding canals, the gardens will grow into one another forming a continuous farmland. This new layer exposes another unfinished project: the modernist vision of towers in open space. The last plateau is supported by Manhattan’s tallest. Devised to harvest energy at high altitudes, the growing limbs of skyscrapers will gradually join to form new power networks. This newly created landscape of energy flows reveals another hidden layered: pyramids, neo-gothic spires, neoclassical tops, and steel antennas posing as a city of monuments.

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link to publication

Of Urban Islands, Rhizomes, and Other Archaeologies

Experimental Project
New York, NY. 2012
Published in Ground Up, University of California, Berkeley. 2013
Exhibited at SP_ARC Gallery, Marietta, GA. 2013

Design: M. Razvan Voroneanu

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© M. Razvan Voroneanu. 2014