Diagnosing the Fragility of Neoliberal Urbanism
ICARUS establishes the theoretical and spatial foundation of my final year MArch thesis. The project begins by reading Trafford Wharfside not as an isolated development site, but as part of a wider system shaped by global instability, regional inequality, land-value pressure, and market-led regeneration. Through futures thinking, stakeholder mapping, policy analysis, and field-based spatial studies, the work traces how development intensity can simultaneously produce economic growth and deepen issues of public access, housing affordability, and spatial exclusion.
The design rationale was not to produce a fixed proposal, but to construct a “thinking system”: a critical framework capable of translating socio-political conditions into spatial parameters. Density, porosity, typology, compactness, and distribution are identified as the first computational levers through which Trafford’s inequalities might be tested. ICARUS therefore acts as a diagnosis of the site’s fragility and a methodological launch point for computational agency in PROMETHEUS.
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