Program: Urban strategic design, Scenario planning
Location: Antwerp, Belgian
Period: 2013-2014
ANTWERP URBAN RING
Our cities are built on infrastructure. Motorways, bridges and pipes, these infrastructures compose invisible networks of urban environment, providing a framework for urbanization. Infrastructure is not only a system of division, allocation, and construction of the surfaces, but also a mean of control, to restrict or stimulate urban expansion.
Carbon Added Tax (CAT), a new-raised economic regime is introduced as departure relating to the discourse of infrastructure. The project considers what the future of the Antwerp Ring might look like after the implementation of carbon added tax, employing economic and engineering models to inform my speculations. Taking the ring as a case study, the project looks into two main aspects. First, the cause and effect chain of Carbon Added Tax and its impacts on transportation as a complex theory. And secondly, the mechanism of infrastructure, how it works, how it’s organized, and how it shapes the city.