Borrowed Land

Idi Ece Kucuk, MArch (Year: 5)

The shifting character of the coastline in Britain brings our attention to the measurement of a line in relation to the production landscape. The project responds to the Roll-Back Scheme, a Shoreline Management Policy which defines the line between Britain and the North Sea based on the geometry of administrative boundaries instead of geomorphic processes. As both a planning strategy and spatial proposal for coastal farming in the UK, the project pilots a model for a redistribution of risk through collective maintenance and co-operative ownership.The proposal sets out a series of successive landscapes, which differ in height, species, transparency, cross sectional quality and density to produce a set of edges for the horizon line, and create borders to diversify. These soft and hard infrastructural screens, informed by a series of comparative environmental conditions, exercise public rights along the fore- shore. Gardens, new tree plantations and access infrastructure; sub - sub divisions within the thickness of agricultural boundaries which are occupied and maintained collectively. Ultimately, the project uses the offset gap defined by the Roll-Back scheme as an easement to define the public, revisiting the landscape as one which is driven by use, not ownership; promoting a new language around public space.