Invisible Cities: COTTONOPOLIS: A critical reflection on the image of sustainability and the promise of production

Abstract

The project uses architecture to speculate how we might make the invisible metropolis of the cotton industry hidden within the region on Xinjiang, China, visible alongside its negative production externalities and its practice sustainable. This project understands cotton in its current global state of production, consumption and price point can never be sustainable and ethical at the same time. It resigns to reality and instead attempts to imagine another. Cottonopolis gives form to the insidious and pervasive nature of China’s monopoly within the context of the global cotton industry and conceptualises the process in a single narrative told through architecture. It is a story of the image of sustainability, and the promise of future production. 1 in 5 of the cotton products available in the world are produced or pertain cotton which was grown in Xinjiang, China making it the most productive region in the world. Taking into account the vast scale of infrastructure currently dedicated to the cotton industry in the region of Xinjiang, China, it seeks to visualise the elements (farm to factory) together as a total system; a city. Within this context, the architecture gives form to a new alternative: a sustainable factory at a city scale, revealing the Cottonopolis. A city which metabolises all the waste of its key products: water, cotton, humans. However in this alternative reality, the factory presents a completely unethical system made to be completely sustainable. It is a satire an imagined reality and by no means a real argumentation for architecture that should exist. However, all the elements of the narrative presented in the project to some degree exist in the context of Xinjiang. The ridiculousness and darkness of the project exists simply because it is an exaggerated reflection of reality. In short, it illustrates the duality of discourse which currently surrounds the cotton industry in Xinjiang. The bizarre story of infrastructural gymnastics to grow the global supply of cotton in a desert and play on the edges of what could be a reality of how the cotton goods used in our every day might be grown and produced tomorrow. Architecture, Urbanism and Building Science