There’s a prevalent perception that abandonment equals suspension, stasis, a halt.

2050: A New World asks students to reframe “abandonment” as an inherent part of the lifespan of the built environment, one that embodies other kinds of presence and flow despite human absence.

The work blurs the boundaries between historical methods and design thinking to question how we can decentre the meaning of future heritage beyond human “obsession” with physical preservation. The outcome is a series of speculative drawings that argue for a transgressive lens that moves away from abandonment as a strict boundary between the site’s past and future, reconceptualising it as more than a marginal, almost absent condition.