2024 - Bass Development Studio
Issa Diabate, Anna Dyson & Matthew Rosen, critics
The Abidjan region is as much a lagoon-scape as it is a landscape. Along the Ebrie lagoon’s edge, the land belongs to both everybody and nobody, creating a zone that is both precarious and highly contested in the face of escalating demographic pressures, with fishermen and coastal ecosystems caught in the crossfire.
The design proposal builds on the social organization of the fishing collective, proposing an urban plan centered on the aquaculture institute that acts as the node of a working waterfront that can respond to ecologies and economies of stewardship across social groups. The urban scheme protects the mangroves both for their aesthetic and their infrastructural value; treating them as a future economic driver through carbon funding, a barrier against coastal erosion, and the foundation for a healthy coastal fishery ecosystem. A formal language of weaving scales through the mangroves and into urban forms. The workers' housing, mid-rise apartments, and gathering spaces allow air, water, and vegetation to flow through—creating an inland urban hinterland that supports and supplements the mangrove forest.