Intergenerational market with urban farming
This project reimagines the Mancunian Way as a new civic food landscape, transforming an overlooked piece of transport infrastructure into an intergenerational market, urban farm, and public gathering space. Located beneath and around the existing viaduct, the proposal challenges the idea of the motorway as a barrier by turning it into a “Second Ground” where communities from Hulme, Ardwick, and the Oxford Road Corridor can meet, trade, grow, cook, and learn together.
At the heart of the building is a civic food market, organised as the main social condenser of the project. Market stalls, community kitchens, dining spaces, workshops, and gathering areas are arranged around visible routes and shared public spaces, encouraging everyday encounters between different ages, cultures, and users. Above the market, urban farming areas, greenhouses and vertical farming across all levels to support a plant-to-plate system, linking food production with selling, cooking, and communal exchange.
The building uses the existing infrastructure as both shelter and identity, while introducing a lightweight timber structure, brick facades, timber louvres, and retractable canvas systems to improve comfort, light, and adaptability. The design responds to Manchester’s climate through layered passive strategies, including shading, natural ventilation, planting, and flexible outdoor cover.
Rather than treating food only as a commodity, the project uses food as a social medium. It proposes a future where markets become inclusive civic spaces: places of memory, learning, wellbeing, and belonging, reconnecting fragmented communities through everyday acts of growing, sharing, and gathering promoting intergenerational exchange.
