In Carnisse in the city of Rotterdam, a combination of aging demographics, monotonous repetition of housing and impoverishment led to a current situation which requests quite the innovations. The problem of disconnection and loneliness, was a conclusion that came forward very frequently after a period of careful research and local conversations. Why are these problems especially to be found at the semi-suburbs of a dense city? What is the lacking factor of the intent which which results in a much worse form of connection than in, for example, a village? A lot of factors can be applied for which each explain their own contribution to the problem, like scale, history and demographics. In this project, tackling this problem of disconnection focusses especially on the factor of urban development and intent.
How does a village grow in comparison to a city? A big part of the answer to this question, has especially to do with scale. The growth in a village, can be considered more as a human scale, compared to the growth of a city. The growth in the latter, consisted of large, endless stripes of terraced houses which only connects one street to another at the crossroads. A grow of a village, is mainly concerned with a few houses. People can connect and observe the effects of a growth at this scale. In the city, such an injection is too large to form a connection, especially in the monotonous setup of urban composition in the area of Carnisse. There are no borders in here, no urban sense of conglomerations which could form a neighborhood, a sense of borders at a smaller scale to form an area in which familiar faces can be seen.
This project therefore focused on maintaining small but notable interventions between the existing houses of Carnisse. Cutting the strokes and shifting the pieces to create packages of small borders within the borders of Carnisse. These packages then can be applied at any point in the existing composition of current Carnisse, and creates an archipelago in which small neighborhoods form their own conglomeration in the urban area of Carnisse. In here, the cutting boxes are positioned in a way in which it allows and stimulates more visible and spatial connection to its surroundings. The deformations in street profile, breaks the rectilinear flow of the street and allows the human as pedestrian to be dominant again instead of the car.