Latent City: Potential Infrastructures in the New Urban Economy

What are the procedures, bases, effects and potentials of small, collective activity? What are the economies of such activity? And what chances of propagation for more activity exist within these systems? Gathering places, temporal events, empty land and urban policy loopholes are implicated in this project to generate short-term activity zones in east downtown Houston with the intention of encoding longer-term territorial scenarios there as an alternative to conventional forms of city development.

The goal: A streetlife that achieves its ultimate permanent state via a nuanced, flexible development overtime.

The architecture project: a network of event infrastructure (covered paths, public rooms, way finding mechanisms, urban installations) that interacts across the site with a gradient of infill “event hubs” (outdoor or indoor park/parking/plaza areas that are programmatically indeterminate and transmutable.)