Location: The Hague, NL

'Complex Figure_Ground Relationships' is a critique towards the idea of 'multiple ground' in current urban planning memoranda in The Netherlands. The problem at a local scale is that multiple programmes are merely being stacked. At a large scale, schemes propose a final image in fifteen years. As such uncontrollable economic forces render it obsolete from the beginning. These propositions lose out on potentials in the third and fourth dimensions and hence not actually densify space, nor in terms of programme, neither in terms of flow and connections. The clear paradox is that the same departments that present highly contemporary concerns and wishes try to solve them with obsolete strategies of planning. Instead of merely stacking multiple programme in a holistic scheme, C.F.G. proposes an adaptive growth model in which program can expand and contract. The hypothesis is that this spatial strategy will enable alternative urban mechanisms such as guided 'bottom-up' urban insertion and time-based programming/navigation. Tectonic base forms an expandable urban fabric in which the collapse of movement and programme allows for an unstable and evolving occupation in response to urban dynamics such as flow-pressure, sequence of plot liberation and occupation, changes in infrastructure and pressure of development.