The (r)urban temporary: towards resilience through an alternative Copenhagen

Abstract

This thesis work has its starting point in the increasing challenge of current and future uncertainties, crises, and risks that cities face today and how resilience can enhance our possibilities to counteract those. Translating this issue into the field of architecture, this thesis identifies the growing disconnect between our permanently planned cities and our faster and faster-changing societies as a challenge towards resilience. Studying recent Copenhagen urban developments - which are hugely based on planning and designing for permanence throughout all scales, functions, and locations - supports the need for a shift in how we develop our cities moving forward. The thesis therefore, explores how, in contrast to that, planning and designing for temporariness can be an alternative approach. The aim is to create design strategies as a toolbox to set up temporariness in the built environment. Those strategies then get translated into exemplary iterated architectural elements. Furthermore, the thesis explores how connecting and combining strategies and elements creates an improved (r)urban environment capable of reflecting societies needs and demands. It moreover investigates how to react to those over time by adapting the elements through their strategies based on their predicted duration of existence. Several supporting site visits help analyze the distinctive identity of the application context, a former shipyard area in Copenhagen called Refshaleøen. The elements then get implemented in that rurban environment to showcase experimental scenarios that explore the possibilities of designing for temporariness as an alternative to the current reality of (r)urban development.