Dr Craig Martin
Ph.D Research: Phenotypic Plasti-City
Phenotypic Plasti-City: Heuristics For Climatically Derived Urban Form Adapting to Seasonal and Daily Environmental Forces and Rhythms.The solar city is an oxymoron: buildings close together shade each other and thus prevent insolation (solar exposure). This is particularly true in Northern Latitudes, where low sun angles in winter cast long shadows. European cities contain other problems; their early development has left remnants of medieval street plans that have no inherent solar orientation. In England in particular, it seems very unlikely that there will ever be any large-scale urban re-planning of cities on solar principles. An earlier M.A. research aim was to discover whether it is possible to create a city ofolar buildings without this sort of intervention? This led me to develop the 'The Synergy Crystal', a volume that is fully insolated and yet does not impair other sites' views of the sun.
With Synergy Crystal research as a basis for growth, a doctoral study has now developed towards a visualization of pure solar city adapted to historical built context; a city that responds to environmental forces and rhythms throughout the day and season. This study known as ‘Phenotypic Plasti-City’ principally asks the question whether communities of the ‘Natural’ can be analogous and used as a metaphor for those of the sustainable ‘Synthetic’? It has been envisaged that comparison at macro, meso, and micro scales under the solar ‘vectors’ of Direct, Diffuse, and Global, will indicate a sustainable response at a community, typological, and surface level (façade).
By recognizing the forest as an intensified, light stratified system, grown through a sequential process of ‘succession’ this study has identified a flexible Global Vector (sunlight and daylight) strategy for future European brownfield ‘compact’ city growth. In brief, within each layer of a stratified temperate forest, light is a limiting factor. The Direct Vector (direct sunlight) creates a shade environment, that through ‘natural selection’ or more specifically ‘coevolution’, Diffuse derived species, namely shade-tolerants, are able to survive. Shade, however, is not the requirement, but the ability to tolerate shade is. This specialization between species ensures that ‘interspecific’ competition is muted as species retreat to their own particular habitat or ‘ecological niche’. As a consequence Shade-Intolerants and Shade-Tolerants are able to coexist or interact through a ‘commensalistic’ relationship.
Through a process of synthetic ‘natural selection’ city mechanisms such as dwellings (Shade-Intolerant species), offices and commercial premises (Shade-Tolerant species) are also able to interact daily and seasonally ‘symbiotically’. In addition, a synthetic ‘silvicultural’ process of ‘seeding’ an urban grid enables specific cities to be grown sequentially i.e. a prevalently diffuse daylight commercial district or direct solar housing community. Hence, terms that were previously the sole domain of forest ecology such as 'Pioneer’ and 'Climax Phase', 'Shade-tolerant’, and ‘Shade-intolerant’ are now brought into solar city research description.
 A Mancunian Polyclimax, Phenotypic Plasti-City. |
 Phenotypic Plasti-City: Cyclic motion (09.00hrs+12.00hrs+15.00hrs) |
 Phenotypic Plasti-City |