With special economic zones growing rapidly via supply chain expansion in the ecommerce and global goods trade age, world economic hubs and their surrounding cities are being consumed by non-descript landscapes of bonded warehouses and light assembly facilities. These spaces exist in specific locations to not only serve a consumer base but also for transnational corporations to evade standard trade tariffs, import taxes, and regulations. This spatial and economic disconnect increasingly affects surrounding residential neighborhoods as zones grow to the outermost limits of natural and man made boundaries.

These support cities, such as Mississauga, Ontario, are losing ground as land prices soar and corporations encroach further. The point has been reached in which only infrastructural corridors, pathways, and gateways remain as the buffer between the hungry corporate entities and their neighbors. Augmenting these between spaces, no mans lands of exception, cities and neighborhood communities can fortify their territory and plan for eventualities of new resilience. By cutting unexpected populations into the zone’s benefits, novel opportunities to common utilities and community institutions arise along existing infrastructure pathways.

The project exists to question the paradigms of capital and corporate imperialism while proposing fittings of hybridized typologies that act within those rigid frameworks to amplify local presence and manufacture civic appeal at networked leverage points.

Located: Mississauga, Ontario

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[winter 2021] Thesis_Prof. Malcolm McCullough