Review by Eric Hunting / International Society of Biourbanism

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"Paracity is a new project of Marco Casagrande which promises to be one of the first full-scale demonstrations of a practical peer-to-peer urbanism. Taking advantage of a unique situation on the Danshui River Island in Taipei, Paracity explores a notion of positive urban parasitism, using a novel, freely adaptive, modular, volumetric structural skeleton serving as an urban ‘backplane’ that can subsume otherwise neglected/devalued urban environments, in this particular case an area prone to frequent flooding. Based on a fairly large span cubic structural grid made of cross-laminated timber, this backplane accommodates adaptation and habitation by retrofit, allowing for several possible tiers of social participation in the habitat from the high-level peer-managed deployment of the backplane structure and its key infrastructure elements to the more spontaneous and personalized retrofit deployment of individual dwellings, industry, and commerce. Here we see a totally evolvable urban habitat able to almost spontaneously accommodate any potential change in the situation, environmental conditions, urban and domestic technology, and baseline standard of living without the strife associated with an anachronistic presumption of architectural permanence leading to ready obsolescence. This is ‘city’ as a verb. A freely evolvable urban organism with a declared evolutionary imperative of transitioning older urban habitats toward sustainable integration with the natural environment. A Post-Industrial habitat growing on the compost of Industrial Age urbanism." ...