London Design Silver

2025

Climate Squatters

Entrant Company

Xiaotong Lu, Nora Aldughaither, Bryan Velastegui Cordova, Arjun Prajapati, Tung Shiau

Category

Architectural Design - Student Design

Client's Name

Country / Region

United Kingdom

Villages on the coast of the UK are disappearing from the map as their land is being washed away into the sea. These villages that are vulnerable to erosion are expected to lose a significant amount of land in the current and future years with a lack of governmental support and compensation, as they’re left with a “No Active Intervention” coastal management plan.



This project takes Happisburgh - a coastal village experiencing aggressive coastal erosion, as a hypothetical site to explore a system to enable the communities to travel intelligently as modern squatters through the use of a platform, enabling them to be active agents in their process of relocation, habitation and migration.



The house is recycled, reassembled, refurnished and relocated, as the erosion coming closer. The agents use an online alarming platform to chose their new habitat, new units layout and new adding materials. In the meantime, rewilding the abandoned land while migrating to the new place without leaving any negative things behind.



The system seeks to reinitialize and ritualise the process of migration throughout generations, by creating a continuous process of relocation triggered by the existential threat of coastal erosion.



Climate Squatters seeks to implement a system that responds to the needs of the inhabitants of places at risk of coastal erosion world-wide, by allowing them to relocate to their next chosen place. The system aims to benefit from the process of optimization; thus enabling the migration and relocation to be enhanced every time.



Climate Squatters is a non-extractivist social unity without fixed habitation, that forms around the idea of generating identity through community value, a care for non humans and physical elements representative of the inhabitants. With the help from automation and technological mobility it will generate a self sufficient sustainable, adaptable and opportunistic way of living in order to avoid the hardships of climate change driven coastal erosion.

Credits

Xiaotong Lu
Nora Aldughaither
Bryan Velastegui Cordova
Arjun Prajapati
Tung Shiau
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