Ecotone; A Tale of Cohabitation with Water, Aircrafts and Foxes 2013-2014
(The transitional Landscape between the river Mimram and Welwyn Garden city)
By provoking conditions through speculating on technologies, materials and statutory regulations, Ecotone interrogates ways we interconnect with our surrounding and focuses on porosity as a vital property of space. It proposes solutions that reinvent themselves repeatedly by questioning their own positions within a complex interconnection of living and non-living components.
The project was initiated in September 2013 following the expiry of the lease from the land owner, Mariposa Investments, who intended to redesign-ate the use of the land, for developing 700 housing on Panshanger.
Being a former general aviation aerodrome during the WWII, Panshanger has been marked with a 1km long runway and is privileged by having Mimram River passing through it’s north side. River Mimram which provides the consume water of Welwyn Garden City, is a chalk stream which is England’s unique habitat.
Pre-assumptions:
- Panshanger to become a wetland that filters, cleans and recycles consumed water of Welwyn Garden city back to the River Mimram
- Accommodating the flow of water within the existing context that contain everyday activities such as eating, sleeping, contemplating etc .
This is not an attempt to propose predefined ‘solutions’ but rather an intervention that opens up, in a long-term, process of adaptive co-habitation.
©Raha Farazmand