Cities are full of all kinds of spaces: commercial, corporate,public and private. Pseudo public spaces appear to be public but are actually privately owned and controlled, confusing the environmental definitions of the city. Though seemingly open and accessible, practices of unnecessary restriction, hostile design and a lack of transparency accumulate in these spaces to undermine the accessibility of the city.
With Mobile Territories I explore the affordances of the city and how we exist within it. The project is a new speculative park, The Green : a connected network of portable park patches, made of tufted carpet, that function as mobile territories. A tool for spatial claim and appropriation, the park patch gives the public agency in an increasingly privatised environment and interrogates the concepts of occupation and land ownership.
On an individual scale, these tufted park patches are carried and used by city dwellers as a personal tool for accessibility, an interface to soften the unfriendly cityscape. On a larger scale, having a park patch is to subscribe to a wider movement — each person is a piece of a larger whole which culminates as a community park, a collaborative land spread.
Mobile Territories alters the visual language and material engagement of the city. The paved cityscape is transformed into a green tufted expanse, materialising a speculative landscape. An abstract territory which exists in scale but not in form; the tufted park patch is a transient layer of objection — an act of domestication and nomadic settlement over the area on which it resides. By claiming square footage, taking up space becomes a way of taking control of space, temporarily shifting a pseudo public space into a defined public domain.
