Peri(feral) City
Periphery - The outer limits or edge of an area or object.
Feral - The non-designed, often unintended, consequences of human-made infrastructure on the natural world.
Peri(feral) City reimagines urban living through the lens of social ecology, entanglement, and collective authorship. Set on Pomona Island—an often forgotten yet quietly alive site in Manchester—this project explores how architecture can reclaim spaces abandoned by capital and reclaimed by nature. Once a vital node of the industrial revolution as the innermost dock of the Manchester Ship Canal, Pomona now exists as a feral wilderness: an edgeland at the threshold between the urban and the wild.
The project uses the idea of zones of indistinction—places that defy rigid categorisation, existing both inside and outside the city, inside and outside human control. These edgelands resist legibility and planning logic; they are undefined, emergent, and full of potential. Peri(feral) City proposes a network of adaptable, community-driven interventions—not fixed buildings, but a methodology of inhabiting space that evolves over time. This approach champions a fluidity of place, resisting the top-down imposition of form, function, and hierarchy that characterises contemporary urban development.
In contrast to the monological, profit-oriented model reshaping cities like Manchester—where towering developments erase local character and privilege capital—the project argues for a pluralistic, participatory process that foregrounds lived experience, ecological interdependence, and the creative potential of marginal spaces. By embracing the wildness of Pomona rather than sanitising it, the project cultivates new relationships between people, place, and nature.
Ultimately, Peri(feral) City is not a fixed design, but a call to resist uniformity and reclaim the right to the city. It invites us to see value in the indistinct, the feral, and the peripheral—and to build in ways that honour complexity, subjectivity, and shared agency.
