Abstract
Human beings have been encroaching into coastal areas rapidly during the last few decades. Coastal environment plays a crucial role in economic development and ecological balance all over the world. Take China as an example, coastlines play an important role in its economic development especially coastal tourism, leading to a series of issues of coastal areas such as water pollution and coastal erosion resulted from unreasonable engineer construction.
This thesis project tries to explore about a sustainable strategy in coastal areas to balance between coastal protection and human being’s usage and expansion toward coastal areas. The concept “co-market” is proposed to develop the whole project based on a series of research which will be introduced in the part of site analysis and concept development.
The co-market space is not only about selling and buying goods by money, it works as a platform where people can exchange something that cannot get by money such as time, health, knowledge, love and climate. The co-market space will converge people from different groups to come together to communicate with each other, exchange local goods, get profits and protect the existing coastal environment…
The project tries to develop the co-market concept in twofold:
1. Explore the co-market system at the macro urban scale in the local context by exploring various relationship between street and architecture space (masterplan).
2. Develop co-market space at the micro architectural scale based on the analysis and understanding of people’s daily life and real need of local existing communities near coastal areas.
Supervisor's comments:
With water covering more than 70% of our planet’s surface, it is almost unforgivable not to consider the ever-shifting relationship between land and water, and how it relates to our existence. Concerns over how to do more with ever diminishing resources is not a recent contention. What has developed is an ever-growing reliance on technology and the rapidly increasing urgency to right the global wrong before we reach a tipping point of no-return. “Living with coast” started as an exploration of how climate impacts our relationship with the built environment, but it grew into a specifically crafted environmental development strategy that weaves a local coastal culture with a global environmental concern. It brings us as close to a symbiotic existence as feasible between man and nature.
- Adj. Assoc. Prof. Neo Sei Hwa