2021-2022

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This is a design for a distribution park in Milton Keynes that emphasises its position on the margin. Neither totally gridded nor organically grown, the city has a reputation as a thoroughfare. Here, people, vehicles, and goods flow regularly through the city, the urban fabric of which swerves around existing ecological features, also importantly facilitating wildlife corridors.

A proposed model for urbanism bridges the utilitarian and industrial with the wild and earthen. The demand for distribution parks in Milton Keynes is met with a scheme that produces porous and accessible edges for the city, using metal components to contain earth quarried from the clay-rich site and form enclosures. A new development extends the city’s cycle infrastructure, capitalising on a unique opportunity for Milton Keynes to become a centre of leisure cycling and to support a local logistics trade served by cargo bikes. Distribution parks become green, peopled and community-owned spaces that operate locally and nationally, welcoming hybridity and fluidity as essential to the contemporary experience of the English landscape.