Among the many writers of disasters and crisis – from Barthes to Blanchot to Ballard – there is a strain of thinking that rejects the normative and reductive assumption that a disaster must be met with an austere temper or melancholic pragmatism. Rather, disasters can breed their own wild creativity. The ​Lagoonous Assemblage: Antifragile Urbanism for a dry Los Angeles Honorable Mention proposal seems to take this direction, asking how the drought can be conceived of as an opportunity.

Lagoonous Assemblage : Antifragile Urbanism for a dry Los Angeles by Tanzil Shafique

The central question this project explores is how to turn crisis into an opportunity and the notion of antifragility gives a philsophical background to such design exploration agenda. It is defined as a quality of a system to benefit from exposure to disorder/stress/disaster, as opposed to resiliency which merely adapts to the stress. Can a re-invented urbanism be envisoned for Los Angeles that uses the drought as a pre-condition for future development? 

Lagoonous Assmeblages are arrived at by territorial re-organization, which is applied on the existing fabric of the city by first identifying natural urban runoff collecting points, which are then metamorphosed into lagoon networks. Multi-agent system simulation is used to derive the network of reservoirs, which is the primary city-scale network as well as the secondary fibrous lagoon networks. The islands created by the inter-weaving canals then become host to programs depending on the context of the city. In this exemplary design, the node at downtown Los Angeles is further programmed and is visualized as a diversified parkland where the existing infrastructure is weaved with the canal network creating landforms that are programmable from being agricultural to being recreational. A complex topology is generated by juxtaposing human needs, protected woodlands, wilidlife habitat and recreational circulation such as biking and boating. Seasonal water level changes create a dichotomous landscape. Environmental variation is embedded into the islands through the capacity of automated misting feature that creates a cool climatic condition on hot days. Furthermore, the Lagoonous Assemblage gives resiliency to the city from floods as the entire assemblage acts as a natural flood flow zone. These concentrated lagoon networks forms a complex system of architecture, urbanism, infrastructure and landscape throughout Los Angeles that reshapes the iconoclastic image of the city from the sprawling, grided city to the fluidic, metamorphosizing urbanity, that not only survives the drought but rather thrives in it.

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From the judges:

"Absolutely addresses the right question: Can a re-invented urbanism be envisoned for Los Angeles that uses the drought as a pre-condition for future development?​" – Allison Arieff, SPUR

Check out the image gallery for Lagoonous Assemblage's complete presentation.

Click here to see the other winners in both the Pragmatic and Speculative categories!