Mayfield's Gut
For over a century, the River Medlock has largely been buried beneath Mayfield, suppressing its ecological presence and reflecting a wider condition of urban sterility in which biodiversity is increasingly disconnected from everyday urban life. Reduced exposure to diverse microbiota, combined with polluted and overly sanitised environments, is increasingly linked to immune-mediated diseases in urban populations.
Mayfield’s Gut reimagines the River Medlock as an urban probiotic infrastructure. Operating between architecture and microbiology, the project uses exposure-based interventions to engage immunoregulatory microorganisms while making human–microbial relationships spatially legible. Public health is framed as inseparable from ecological diversity, rejecting sterile urban models in favour of coexistence with biodiverse environments. Through phased citizen-science initiatives, bioremediation strategies, and partial renaturalisation of the river, the proposal reconnects residents with ecological systems largely absent from contemporary urban life.
Developed through large-scale hand drawings and material testing, the project explored relationships between microbial ecologies and spatial experience. Bioreceptive ceramics and flood-responsive landscapes were tested for their ability to support microbial colonisation, positioning infrastructure as an evolving ecological scaffold.
Ultimately, Mayfield’s Gut reconceives the River Medlock as living infrastructure in which urban health is shaped through microbial exchange, while promicrobial design approaches challenge dominant antimicrobial paradigms.
