Rohan Humphrey Y5
The Urban Farm Project
The Urban Farm Project reimagines the abandoned ruin of Turin’s former zoo as a testbed for future habitation. Closed in 1987, the site has evolved into an urban wild: a landscape of overgrown enclosures and obsolete infrastructures. Rather than restoring this legacy, the project transforms it into a speculative environment for multispecies coexistence, ecological repair, and experimental culture.
Isolated by river and road, the site operates as a controlled post-urban fringe where alternative forms of settlement can be tested. In response to climate instability and the fragility of centralised governance, the proposal establishes a community organised around skilled trades and transhuman relational ethics that recognise human, animal, and material agencies as interdependent.
Structured as a closed-loop agricultural system, architecture emerges through cultivation, extraction, and adaptation. Sheep and bees become active co-inhabitants, supporting cycles of production: wood, wool, wheat, and wax. Through this regenerative framework, the project reclaims a former site of captivity as a simulated landscape where new relationships between ecology, technology, and society can evolve.
