Models of Abandonment

Infrastructure as Systemic Design

Role: Systems Research, analysis and Environmental Governance Design Lead
Regions: United Kingdom
Type: Geospatial Systems Study, Civic Infrastructure, and Technopolitical Analysis

Introduction

Abandonment is not collapse.
It is coordination — an infrastructural choreography where systems of finance, logistics, and maintenance enact the cyclical metabolism of capital.

What appears as decline is, in fact, a designed withdrawal: the strategic suspension of care to reset value, redistribute risk, and reauthorise ownership.
To study abandonment is to observe how infrastructure performs temporality, how the built environment becomes a programmable asset that manages decay as a phase of renewal.

Abandonment is not the failure of design; it is its most sophisticated form.

World-Systemic Frame

Through the lenses of world-systems analysis, complexity theory, and architectural systems design, Models of Abandonment exposes how logistics, energy, and information infrastructures form the scaffolding of global accumulation.

In this schema:

• Core regions externalise failure through disinvestment and asset rotation.
• Semi-peripheries inherit liability and become laboratories of deferred remediation.
• Peripheries absorb ecological residue and social risk.

Finance is not a reaction to decay — it is the author of it.
Bond markets, depreciation schedules, and deferred maintenance policies act as instruments of spatial governance, rendering ruin as a tradable derivative of empire.

Here, architecture becomes a form of macroeconomic interface — a medium through which planetary systems of logistics and extraction inscribe territorial hierarchy.

Civil / Civic Reciprocity

Post-industrial infrastructure operates as a dual technology — simultaneously civil and civic:

• Civil Engineering governs material performance, load paths, and degradation.
• Civic Engineering governs visibility, regulation, and public narrative.

Each sustains the other: neglect is legalised through civic delay, while remediation is capitalised through civil data.

To design within abandonment is to intervene in this coupling — to align physical diagnostics with governance design.

Observation Architecture

The project proposes a network of Observation Nodes — hybrid civil–civic laboratories that pair engineering diagnostics with governance protocols.

Each node functions as a site of multi-scalar sensing, where material stress, financial exposure, and public accountability are co-measured.

Civil Instruments

• Geospatial Scanning: LiDAR, satellite, and drone photogrammetry for mapping dormant corridors and depots.
• Flow Analysis: MATLAB, AutoCAD Civil 3D, and QGIS reveal latent network capacities.
• Power Diagnostics: BIM forensics combined with legacy telemetry to benchmark systemic fatigue.
• Resilience Modelling: Network degradation mapped through Python and CloudCompare.

Civic Instruments

• Consent Protocols: Ensuring free, informed, and revocable participation.
• Harm/Benefit Ledgers: Quantifying environmental and social impact per site.
• Performance-Indexed Leases (PILs): Binding financial rent to ecological compliance.
• Community Equity Tranches (CETs): Translating subsidy into non-dilutable public equity.
• Open Ledger Covenants (OLCs): Real-time, auditable dashboards for public trust.

Together, these systems form a dual instrumentality — one diagnosing, the other redistributing.

Complexity as Method

Abandonment is modelled as a feedback process, not a terminal state.
Each infrastructural cycle operates through recursion between data, regulation, and speculation:

• Information Loop: Sensor data feeds revaluation models.
• Regulatory Loop: Policy triggers selective compliance to defer repair.
• Financial Loop: Credit instruments determine when decay becomes profitable.
• Sociotechnical Loop: Public pressure modulates when regeneration is declared.

Form emerges not from growth, but from managed decay — a computational landscape of entropy and renewal.

Systems Methodology

Each Observation Node follows a six-phase workflow integrating remote sensing, BIM forensics, and civic–legal simulation:

1. Scoping: Corridor or cluster selection based on public value potential.
2. Signal Harvesting: Aggregation of civil (sensorial) and civic (governance) data.
3. World-Systems Positioning: Mapping core–periphery relations across supply chains.
4. Risk Calculus: Identifying shock patterns, failure signatures, and cost-shift histories.
5. Design Synthesis: Co-produced reuse scenarios with local stakeholders.
6. Commitment Engineering: Translating agreements into enforceable governance instruments.

Data here becomes negotiation — a civic language that binds design, accountability, and infrastructure into a continuous feedback ecology.

Results

• Established the Civil–Civic Engineering Framework for post-industrial regeneration.
• Linked environmental indicators (PM2.5, COD, HGV emissions) to financial obligations via performance-led leases.
• Developed prototype Observation Nodes demonstrating civic accountability through open data.
• Introduced adversarial simulation protocols to detect regulatory evasion.
• Enabled integration between engineering models, governance frameworks, and financial instruments to convert disuse into measurable ecological and social value.

Stakeholders & Coordination

• Local Authorities: Testing planning and remediation policies.
• Manufacturers & Distributors: Using nodes for predictive logistics.
• Community Assemblies & NGOs: Validating equity frameworks.
• Financial & Insurance Bodies: Assessing risk mitigation via civic transparency.
• Engineering Consultants: Coordinating datasets under ISO 19650 standards.

Tools & Methods

Spatial Analysis: QGIS, ArcGIS, LiDAR, BIM integration
Simulation & Systems Modelling: MATLAB, Python (System Dynamics, NetworkX)
Engineering Design: AutoCAD Civil 3D, Revit, parametric retrofitting
Data Governance: ISO 19650-compliant digital twins and open-data frameworks
Financial–Civic Modelling: Performance-lease scripting, community equity modelling, ESG auditing

Civic–Technological Insight

Models of Abandonment reframes infrastructure as a living negotiation between technical precision, economic abstraction, and civic ethics.
Where traditional engineering optimises for performance, this model optimises for redistribution — ensuring that maintenance, reuse, and value recovery operate as transparent, participatory systems.

Abandonment, then, is not absence — it is co-production:
a recursive system in which diagnostics, finance, and stewardship converge to rebuild trust, capacity, and ownership.

This project establishes a new architectural paradigm of world-systemic design — where regeneration is engineered not merely through materials or data,
but through the constitutional reform of infrastructure itself.