By 2050, about 80 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. Speedy rate of urbanization and population growth is also apparent in Indonesian cities where innovative urban growth is needed as an investment for human capital.

In 2019 we developed a concept of Loom and Archipelago with IKN as a demonstration case. The new city is something between a loom, with the archipelago weaving a pattern of different life forms that co-exist but can lead to distinct different futures and a flexible, adaptive platform that allows testing, experimenting, developing, and maturing without shame for failure.

We had the idea of connecting the two large present ecosystems: Forest and Ocean. The loom addresses the potential of a city to stimulate the development of human capital by linking governance to culture, science, industry, and community development.

The Archipelago consists of city districts intertwined with landscape features and green and blue corridors. It interacts and cooperates with the territory, constituting a symbiotic landscape that provides the weavers with energy, food, water treatment, and the health benefits of access to nature.

We propose new bamboo plantation land cover as a viable environmental recovery strategy over the substitution of degraded oil palm monoculture land for use in sustainable and affordable housing production. In-house research shows a much better volume/hectare yield and lower waste/hectare generation by bamboo plantations than palm.

In itself, the IKN proposal is a city-making concept to develop a nation-wide Value Chain in order to manufacture the components for the planning, design and construction of affordable and sustainable housing. This aims to improve the quality of life the people with affordable quality spaces, and at the same time to reduce carbon emission and regenerate the local economy through creative industry. Therefore, this concept is not only about housing production, but also about the people, communities, organizations, forms of governance, and environment.

Nature-Based Value Chains

The Bamboo Belt Union initiative targets two main development opportunities: New circular business models based on data-driven land use planning, and Provision of affordable sustainable housing through technologically innovative industrialized manufacturing.

The aim of this project is to address these two agendas through research and partnership-building as innovation experiments within a systemic vision: The development of nature-based, circular value chains specifically aimed at the industry 4.0 production systems.

The most context viable and pertinent forestry resource inside the global tropical belt, as previously identified by CHORA is Bamboo and it´s wide catalog of sub-species.

One hectare of Bamboo produces almost five times as much biomass and simultaneously binds almost three times as much carbon as a traditional softwood plantation such as Teak.

The main strategy is to set up a Value-creating delivery mechanism articulated with the partner´s National Bamboo manufacturing program, towards the implementation of mass-produced yet adaptive building components (Urban Building KITs).

A prefabricated modular building KIT system (BiltKITs) is a component set for the prefabrication and on-site assembly of buildings in urban contexts. BiltKITs address urban growth, especially the need for large numbers of buildings, for example affordable housing, but also industrial and infrastructure construction on a large scale. BiltKITs are systems that consist of several building components, produced by intelligent manufacture processes, often referred to as Industry 4.0.

The end-Products (Bauhutte 4.0)

In the European context, The Technical University of Berlin (TU Berlin) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Production Systems and Design Technology (IPK) have prepared a potential analysis for "Bauhütte 4.0" on behalf of Tegel Projekt GmbH.

The aim of the study was to evaluate the development of a European focal point for urban timber construction in Berlin. The core of the considerations were:

embedded.

CHORA aims to develop a focal point for urban timber construction, by building a digitally networked value chain from forestry to installation, based on integrative planning and design processes.

This would also work as an economical (circular) production system, which is distributed across the region, resource-efficient and embedded in urban systems.

The core of the Bauhütte 4.0 system as a physical location, is planned at the eastern end of the former runway of Tegel airport, outside the western side of the Schumacherquartier.

Here, the Bauhütte 4.0 appears as one or several buildings in which 2 different programs are accommodated: a research factory and a development center with additional cultural functions.

The Bauhütte 4.0 is seen both as the management center of the value chain, and as the planning-production headquarters of industry 4.0 prefabricated building components for the construction of 5 to 10 housing buildings as well as dormitories, educational centers, etc... A model neighborhood will demonstrate different typologies of planning and construction.