The Sprawl – Design Realisation Project, Y4. Tutors: Prof. Laura Allen, Prof. Mark Smout and Rhys Cannon. Through strict building and maintenance rules, Home Owner Associations act as authoritarian agents of financial and moral values: individual appropriation is pushed in the background in favour of collective control, whereby the suburban layout fosters consumption of the ever same products every 20 meters. Spatial alienation and and isolation are juxtaposed to the distilled winning suburban strategies of the Sims: Sharing and gaining of Skillpoints. The Wilshire House, one of the repetitive housing schemes set by the developer, allows quantifying and cataloguing the materials from which American suburbia is built and forms the primary building resource for a new layer of Sprawl. The municipally owned Cul-de-Sac – a HOA loophole – is used for an efficient initial set up, empowering the residents to reappropriate their lost suburban dream through a DIY-manual: Sprawl 2.0.
