Cultures, Communities and Design

Abstract

This proposal explores the urban and architectural implications of the provision of a network of small-scale decentralised community infrastructure hubs in Central Java, Indonesia. The project has been carried out within the ‘Metro Java 2045’ project (www.metrojava2045.org). It builds upon recent work carried out by the Dynamic Cities Foundation and UTSEUS (Shanghai University) which identifies a series of critical interchange points between the high-volume high-speed intercity road infrastructure, and the small-scale local peri-urban ‘desakota’ landscape of Central Java, between Magelang, Yogyakarta and Surakarta that is unsuited for traditional logistics. Conventional infrastructural solutions to this challenge would be: – large-scale manufacturing and logistics hubs on the periphery of cities. – upgrading of local/rural road networks to accommodate industrialisation and development. These solutions would have a dramatic and negative impact on the existing form of desakota urbanisation in the region. An alternative solution put forward by this research proposes a series of intermodal logistics interchanges located at the identified nodes in the Magelang, Yogyakarta and Surakarta corridors. These interchanges facilitate transition from existing local road networks to intercity highways, providing access to national and international markets for communities within desakota environments serviced by existing small roads, lanes and tracks. This strategy potentially reduces the need for extensive new secondary and tertiary road development, while providing the positive economic benefit of increased market access for existing communities. Separate research teams developed speculative proposals for these individual logistics interchanges at each of the identified nodes. Each team explored how these interchanges could be inserted into the particular built environment conditions of each identified node; the principal programmatic elements, proportions and organisational arrangements for each node; and their formal, materials and construction systems. The ambition of this research is to development a series of architectural prototypes for multi-functional urban ‘hubs’ that support local economic development.