Nocturnal Nexus: Three intersecting lives in the 24-Hour Metropolis

RCA Graduate Project (2018)

Within the next 30 years it is expected that 66 percent of the world’s population will live in urban areas. As populations grow and gravitate to cities, society will be forced to reconsider how our cities are occupied and organised.

But can this growth and concomitant reordering of society be seen as an opportunity as opposed to a threat?

If managed correctly, perhaps overpopulation has the potential to furnish our species with a series of cognitive, circadian and social opportunities?

Nocturnal Nexus simulates a future whereby the City of London – facing an acute housing shortage and environmental concerns regarding increasingly longer commutes – initiates a radical new routine – a tripartite working day. This new temporal order enables three different people to inhabit each bed, three to occupy each desk, three to share each car. With every day now split into three 8-hour shifts, cities never have to sleep: a truly 24 hour city can emerge.

In order to facilitate its new 24/7 existence, a series of urban interventions emerge across the City — they enclose areas of the city beneath a large canopy designed to create a perpetually lit 24-hour environment, whilst also providing an infrastructure to recreate any desirable weather condition whatsoever. The new synthetic experiences these spaces create engender new forms of interaction and behaviour. No longer shackled to the caprice of external weather conditions and the unwavering cycles of dawn and dusk, we are free to engage with the city at our leisure.

The society of 24/7—a society of pedantry and precision—generates a world of paradoxical liberation and choice.