The Third Place-Urban Machines

Tehran, Iran’s capital, ranks among the world’s fast-growing cities. In the early 1940s, Tehran’s population was about 700,000. By 1966, it had risen to 3 million and by 1986 to 6 million. Today, the metropolitan area has more than 10 million residents. This explosive growth has had environmental and public health consequences, including air, water pollution and the loss of arable land and public realm. The ever increasing land value makes developments and the replacement of urban open space and easy choice. With the disappearance of open public plaza, by traffic islands and motorways the predominant public space left in the city is its many traffic arteries.

With a young population and the Cars as the main mode of transport in the city, the many highways of Tehran come to a grinding halt during rush hour.

Current solutions put forward to ease congestion have been to increase traffic capacities through the construction of more highways. A prime example is the current construction of a SECOND tier to Sadr highway travelling east to west in Tehran. With this mentality and more projects being conceived at closer proximity to homes and residential areas despite the understanding that such solution can only resolve this issue in the short term, our challenge will be to examine the possibilities of left over spaces and the potential for augmentation and reuse of such infrastructure in the future.

This year will be examining the quality of our urban spaces, we will be looking at infill sites, leftover spaces which have been generated as a result inefficient use of public roads to examine the potential for the generation of usable public space, or in other words the third place(the first being the home, the second the workplace). We will be using our experiences from past years in regards to prototyping and simplex manufacturing to inform proposals for urban machines and interventions. These Proposals will attempt to specifically address site concerns and conditions. Our ambition is to produce and implement these proposals on site across the city.