Rio Burrage Yr 5

Flooding and Dwelling Following a century of neglect to UK flood-mitigation infrastructures, large swathes of settlements in the Thames Estuary are submerged as a result of rising sea levels and extreme weather. A reinterpreted Tilbury emerges within tidal marshland, typically hostile to human occupation. By re-evaluating British cultures of building and dwelling, the ‘Wicked Problem’ of urban flooding becomes an opportunity for a reconciliation between the urban and the natural.

Rising floodwaters are accommodated for by giving more ‘room’ to the Thames River, spreading out its increasingly extreme tidal range. Despite its destructiveness, the disordering power of urban flooding could hold an emancipatory power for peripheral communities in
the Thames Estuary, constituting a form of post-flood ‘commoning’. Urbanism here presently leaves little opportunity for spontaneity and embracing urban flooding as an inevitable force of change could open our cultures of building and dwelling for recalibration.

In New Tilbury, the transition between water and
land becomes an ever shifting border. As landscape
and urbanism become ‘porous’ to accommodate
for consistent change, specifically defined land uses, and consequently individual ownership, are rendered obsolete. Co-operative forms of governance flourish – the town’s communities share ownership and usage over their local polder quadrant.

While the project is ostensibly a ‘New Town’, the concept of urban ‘porosity’ deconstructs the machinistic approach of earlier modernist masterplans. To integrate porosity into the design process, the project was driven by hand drawing practice, creating opportunities for disorder amidst welcome uncertainty.

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