EMPTYing Cities

Wuppertal, Germany

PROJECT
Research-by-design into the problem of shrinking cities, that is, cities that have failed to regroup after losing their industries, and are losing their populations as a result.

PARTICIPANTS
R_E_D and the city of Wuppertal, Germany in the post-industrial Rhine valley.

OBJECTIVE
To replace empty built fabric with ecologically intense replacements of various kind.

R_E_D has been looking at ways in which considering the unbuilt to be as important as the built in the process of urban regeneration. A 'field' model applied to Wuppertal, Germany allowed us to think of the city as a continuum of built and unbuilt, into which could be inserted a range of metabolic functions, from water collection and filtration to energy generation, providing the emptying city an ecological intensity to replace the lost industrial activity.