Kelp Urbanism: Eco-Industrial Architectures in the Littoral Zone

Abstract

The littoral zone is a globally transformative geographic threshold. It mediates economies and ecologies across scalar boundaries and determines the extractive systems and infrastructures that shape cities and seas. Having been programmed for industrial-extractive purposes throughout modernity, the littoral zone today emerges as a critical space to reorient industrial and spatial dynamics towards ecological reciprocity. Sited in the post-industrial littoral zone of Saint John, New Brunswick, this thesis develops a design framework through which production, labour, and public space are reconsidered as outcomes of environmental and ecological design. The thesis proposes an industrial aquaculture campus on disused industrial and brownfield land, utilizing the kelp species and its cultivation-processing-manufacturing cycle as a vehicle for rethinking the organizational flows of a site. Addressing the scale of the masterplan and key processing buildings, the thesis proposes multi-functional eco-industrial architectures in littoral zones can generate new urban frameworks that reciprocally engage land and water.