Hacking the New Development : Turning a Shopping District into a Garment Manufacturing District

Abstract: Chrisp Street Market in London, the first pedestrian shopping district in the UK, will be redeveloped into a contemporary version of a pedestrian shopping district. The design employs the 'mixed-use' building typology often used to make public life 'active' and 'lively', by attracting the population to participate in consumer society in public space, at a time when the role of overconsumption in the acceleration of climate change within sectors like the fashion industry is becoming increasingly problematic. This project explores the potential of hacking into the imagined new development of a shopping distrct, learning the ways in which the urban design creates a consumer society and the capitalist framework under which it operates, in order to imagine a hacked proposal of a garment manufacturing district in which an alternative creative-productive society is created. In this imagined hacked proposal, labour is rendered hyper-visible, the attempt to decolonise fashion is made, and the value of materials from clothes down to the yarn is recaptured.