Abstract

This report explores the appearance and impact of cycles in the urban surrounding and in a second stage their potential for an urban proposition. Cycles appear in any part of live. Examples can be found in time, economics, environment ... and can be seasons, day, technology, events, life cycle, but also particular happenings like rush hour or basic needs such as eating and sleeping. Cycles appear trough a wide range of scales and often without referring to them. They appear out of subsystems evolving over time and generations. The speciality of cycles is the fact that they are closed systems in terms of their repetition. Each cycle repeats itself along its script. This applies a particular rhythm to urban life. But as they are not synchronized they interfere/overlap/top/disturb/... one another. This can be the source of movement and action in urban life. A very abstract picture for this could be a clockwork - of course, here all the different wheels are highly working together for one goal - but maybe cycles in a system are doing this too, just in a different sense, in the sense that the urban system adapts to it. The fi rst part of the report is about research work carried out during the month of July 2006. I observed my personal interaction with the city in terms of different cycles in order to explore different types and their impact. The second part translates different conclusions from the research work onto a proposal based in the Thames Estuary. This work builds up on the AKA project developed by Anika Mittal, Juergen Haepp and myself earlier during the Urban Design Course at the Bartlett School of Architecture. The previous AKA project is taken as a base to test the potential of cycles for a new proposal named as cAKA. The new proposal builds on the ideas of the fl oating city in the Thames Estuary as a new development for the growth of London in the Thames Gateway. It is not the aim of the cAKA proposal to answer all the remained questions on the earlier project, but to densify certain aspects of cycles within an environment of a proposal. The research work therefore acts as a fund of many new aspects to be looked at in this very special environment of an urban development on water.


Keywords
Cycle, Cycles, Rhythm, System, Urban system, Arkway [AKA], Thames Estuary, Clockbank


Word count
About 14’300 without bibliography and addendum.