Elastic Futures

A few months ago, I completed my Senior Honors Thesis, entitled “Elastic Futures: Re-imagining the City’s Relationship with Nature in West Athens”, advised by Dehan Glanz and Anastasia Erasmia Peponi, and greatly influenced by Tom Beischer, Michael Kahan and John Barton. It received a Firestone Medal for Excellence in Undergraduate Research, and the Outstanding Urban Studies Thesis Award. Researching, writing, and designing this thesis was labor of love - one of the hardest and most rewarding projects that I’ve undertaken so far.

By delving into the contemporary history of urban development in Athens, examining the impacts of two distinct architectural movements, and analyzing firsthand data gathered in West Athens last summer, I investigated whether a substantial relationship with nature is congruent with Athenian modernism. My research culminates in a series of design proposals, organized into a ‘restructural’ toolkit for short-term interventions and a ‘destructural’ framework for long-term urban change, both of which aim to mitigate the effects of climate change and achieve greater harmony between nature and the city at the building, lot, and system level.

I am grateful to have spent most of my time this summer in Athens, finding more places where ‘restructural’ and ‘destructural’ interventions might be applicable, creating new additions to the spatial toolkit, and thinking of even more ways that the framework could be expanded beyond West Athens. In a few days I’ll be heading to MIT, where I’ll continue building on the ideas that I began exploring in my thesis, and learn more about how to mend the broken relationship between nature and the city.

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