The Conflux and The Commons: A Floating Architecture for Exchange & Belonging
The Conflux and the Commons explores how existing waterways can be reimagined as active agents in reconnecting fragmented urban landscapes. Set in Manchester and Salford, the project begins with a simple yet critical question:
How can water be used to form symbiotic relationships across the expanding city, reconciling disconnection at the micro, meso, and macro scales?
Through a manifesto grounded in three key aims: setting the precedent for designing for the future now; rebelling against fast-urbanism; centring the water network as essential to sustainable development, the project offers an alternative urban approach rooted in contextual slow-urbanism.
Inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of the rhizome, the design strategy unfolds as a network of decentralised, adaptive interventions. This spatial strategy operate across scales: from tactile, human-level engagements with water at the micro scale, to ecological and social infrastructure at the meso scale, and broader watershed and governance strategies at the macro scale. Each intervention is site-specific, not to be replicated in form, but in ethos and process.
As the network expands, so too does its potential. While anchored in the canals of Manchester and Salford, the project imagines a future in which these strategies become precedent for other post-industrial cities across the UK - and eventually, internationally. This is not a blueprint, but a call to reimagine the role of water as connective vehicle in our urban futures: relational, resilient, and radically contextual.
