Alter Studio 4: New Mechanism of Urban Regeneration - Urban Production and Manufacturing城市再生的新机制——城市生产制造

New Mechanism of Urban Regeneration - Urban Production and Manufacturing was the second studio that Atelier Alter taught at Tianjin University, and its fifth teaching practice at a Chinese school of architecture. Led by Yingfan Zhang, Xiaojun Bu and Christoph Hesse, it was an open design course for graduate students; the final review took place online at 20:00 on 24 June 2023.

The studio aimed to re-establish, through design, the relationship between urban production and residents' daily life, environmental ecology and urban humanity. The site was the South Korean city of Daegu, once a base of light industry, above all textiles, that lost much of its manufacturing economy and where factories are now being replaced by housing. Students investigated the city's regeneration zones, its history of expansion over farmland and its soils, and proposed how production could return to the city.

Nine students worked in two groups. The agricultural group, Edible Daegu, imagined a self-sufficient agricultural city: new material cycles from producer to consumer to decomposer, and planting that climbs balconies, roofs, parking lots and towers in rooftop modules and vertical planting structures. The industrial group, Factory Forest, explored the many possibilities of a factory, mixing production, ecology and living in dense urban fabrics. Critics David Grahame Shane, Vassilia Pirierros, Xinnan Zhang, Jia Mei, Yue Feng and Fangzhou Song joined the review.