Urban Symbiosis

Abstract

How can architecture redefine our current relationship with waste while offering a new way of coexisting within nature? For many, one’s experience with waste is minimal or even hidden. Once thrown, waste is rendered invisible from our consciousness. Waste management plants, located far from city centers, only further alienate our relationship with waste. Yet rather than challenging these legacy systems, greenwashing has instead become the go-to strategy in the pursuit of sustainability. By 2035, Singapore’s one and only landfill site, Pulau Semakau island, will be completely full. Despite this concerning reality, waste production has only continued to increase. While the importance of dealing with waste might be understood, the day-to-day realities of its management are far from enough. This thesis seeks to challenge our current status quo and proposes a new architectural hybrid that brings together housing and composting plant. Waste produced from the housing units are composted to produce biogas and fertilizer, which is subsequently utilized on-site or redistributed to residents, thereby creating a local metabolic cycle. Through the synergistic integration of its form, function and urban exchanges, the project presents an alternative environmental imaginary; one that does not perpetuate our current culture of consumption or the skin-deep imagery of sustainability. Instead, it provides a visceral and tangible feedback loop for residents to quantify and understand the impacts of their waste. In doing so, inviting residents to reconsider waste as more than just a linear end of our material consumption, but part of a much larger metabolic system, a new urban symbiosis for our future.