Out of the Blue: A Nature-Based Armature for Urban Development

This work investigates how water and green can create opportunities for an urban framework, while improving the city ́s economical, ecological and social life. The project proposes a nature-based design strategy addressing the urban challenges of flood, fragmentation and underused spaces to provide social connectivity in the Municipality of Lørenskog. A changing climate and a rapid growing city have become highly problematic: Recently occurring heavy rains, causing flooding of the urban fabric.By taking the watershed with its flows and cycles as base for intervention, the project opens up a new approach towards the existing logics of urban expansion, exploring ecological infrastructure within the wider territory as a place-maker. The vegetation is chosen on the one hand for its spatial qualities, biodiversity and erosion control as well as its capacity of water uptake, often neglected within present hydrological calculations. The present lack of a soft mobility network in this suburban car-based area excludes at present children, elder and people without car from a free, independent displacement possibility. The suburban residual land, connected into a system, reveals possibilities to an alternative soft-mobility network. It links public services and socially important areas within the zonified urbanisation, as well as access to the surrounding natural reserves and high areas of the watershed. These problematics are prototypical for the Eastern suburban area of Oslo and will serve as a spatial spine and conceptual entry point for future urban development as a Nature-Based Armature for Urban Development.