New Cities,

Future Ruins

speaker: Ersela Kripa and Stephen Mueller / AGENCY

Time：29 December 2017 

The Shenzhen/Hong Kong border is, like the U.S./Mexico border, crossed by invisible flows of material. Dust, and airborne particulate, index the changing landscape, registering air pollution and construction debris from the rapidly changing landscape, waterscape, and urban environments of the PRD. AGENCY has been recording this material flow, by crossing the Shenzhen/Hong Kong border during their residency, with sensing equipment and other designed artifacts, to lend this invisible entity a new materiality and a new presence. By reading the types, amounts, and qualities of the airborne particulate, they have discovered a reading of an environment in flux.

The interdisciplinary design practice AGENCY engaged in a month-long residency program at Future+ Aformal Academy and Handshake 302 in December 2017, within the New Cities, Future Ruins (NCFR) project in Pearl River Delta. NCFR // PRD aims at re-imagining rapid urbanization in the context of the Pearl River Delta’s mega-cities, connecting them to the extreme-environment sprawl of America's Western Sun Belt. NCFR // PRD is intended as an exchange between North American and Asian sites, exploring the ways planetary urban issues of growth, migration, and sustainability have manifested in both these geographies.