A mixed social and co-working space is at the cutting edge of urban regeneration. Dendron and Sons had franchised the concept of sticking a bunch of tables and pop-up street food shacks in an empty warehouse, repeating the prize winning combination across deserted urban spaces up and down the country.
The real
genius had been branding each business as a separate entity, yet behind
the scenes was part of a conglomerate of various functions sitting
within the umbrella organisation. The burgers, the curries, the beer,
the atmosphere and the prices were the same wherever you went.
Underground were vats of food and drink piped up into fake kitchens,
where employees would pretend to cook and serve the grub to the clueless
customers.
This years
trend was maximalist minimal. The ceiling betrayed the buildings
industrial heritage, yet this is obscured by houseplants spilling from
plant pots suspended in the air with locally sourced macrame. Vivid
wallpaper of toucans and panthers hiding amongst patterned botanicals
was used to focus the viewers attention as it constantly searches for
meaning. There are bookshelves filled with leatherbound books rejected
from charity shops, volumes of poetry, first edition books of science,
piles upon piles of books grabbed by drunks, laughed at, then thrown
onto the fire pits that dot the room.
A
number of other businesses occupied the fringe of these consumer zones.
Tattooists, barbers, magazine sellers, people peddling vintage military
clothing, shops that can replace the screens of phones, sometimes even a
candlestick maker could be seen hammering their metals with a
candlehammer, whistling a haunting tune.
The
killer idea for these zones was to utilise its failure. As more and
more of these spaces pop up, often spreading their customers across
miles of pop up restaurants, the ones that became abandoned had its own
regeneration built in. Pillars of soil were embedded in each building,
the tables were saturated with mushroom spores, the houseplants would
eventually break from their hammocks and crash to the floor, spreading
root systems through an accumulation of dirt. Within a growing season,
nature would take over entirely and transform the space into an internal
garden.
These internal
gardens offer a home for animals, insects and birds of all weights and
volumes. A family of deer can live in these regenerated spaces living
off the fruits of blackberries and lemon trees, often in the heart of a
city centre. The franchise had built in the rot of failed businesses to
serve as the basis for micro-urban green regenerative zones, managing to
offset surrounding businesses by sucking up carbon. Sewage is often
pumped into the abandoned rooms, creating a rich swamp for toads and
catfish to live amongst. Animals we didn't know existed have been found
hiding amongst shrubbery.
Is
this the future of gentrification? Rather than artificially inflating
the value of land bought previously and used to develop tiny flats for
future miserables, Dendron and Sons are turning the usual business model
on its head. By simply doing nothing, nature does its thing and before
you know it your neighbourhood is a forest filled with badgers and foxes
and bears, which in turn act as a kind security company for the rapidly
growing trees and foliage breaking from the ground. The earth cracks
open and swallows cars and a lake fills in the sinkhole. A wolf appears
at a window, its yellow eyes looking down at the person sleeping in the
room beneath. A prelude to a world without people, made all the more
sweeter by walking through the trees and empty buildings, your footsteps
totally silent, traceless.
