Kuno Mayr, Machina Architetti Associati, Marco Ferracuti

Growing from the land. Research project for a sustainable settlement

2015

A circular compluvium appears. The territorial configuration gives a sense of belonging: small Makua villages and mountainous features gather within a wide hilly perimeter around the Pemba Bay. Like some great eye, strongly tied to their homeland, the local people gaze out at the immensity of the ocean. Like a large- scale reverberation, the Pemba Bay gathers and shelters nature and human villages around its creek. The sweeping delta borders the hinterland side with mangroves. People inhabit the bay starting from the Paquitequete and Cimento bairros (districts). The recent extension has traced a network of roads that descend along a slight slope towords the coast. On the edges of the expansion we find fertile ground for a new, but existing, type of settlement. The fulcrum or seed of the growing village, located according to the sensibility of the population, close to recognized natural features, contradicts the logic of the continued expansion and reintroduces a clustering around a large collective space.