Urban Hives

As large green areas in cities are becoming increasingly rare, smaller public and even private gardens are now also disappearing. The city’s inadequate public transportation system drives people towards using cars, encouraging landowners to convert green spaces into parking lots.
Urban Hives seeks to reintroduce the urban garden into these parking lots, and potentially into other public, hard-surfaced spaces.

Urban hives is conceived as a module that raises above 2 cars. Modules can be multiplied or reduced to suit the site and easily assembled and disassembled for maximum flexibility. Thus, the parking lot retains its commercial use, but is also transformed into a site for communal gardening and food growing activity.

Not only would it provide respite from our increasingly overbuilt environment, but it also has the potential to play a vital role in the sustainability of our cities by alleviating local environmental issues (including but not limited to air pollution, mitigating heat-island effect and stormwater runs off) and by helping to build more resilient cities where food is grown within vicinity, avoiding food transportation. Furthermore, Urban Hives has the ability of bringing communities together in a common social exercise, building community spirit and encouraging people to preserve and maintain public green spaces – which are a key component of a sustainable city.

Beirut Design Week 2018

Architecture Lea Keyrouz
Visual Communication Joseph Kai
Construction Wood Factory
Permaculture Consultant Compost Baladi
With the support of the American University of Beirut Neighborhood Initiative
Photos by Marco Pinarelli

Amman Design Week 2019

Architecture Lea Keyrouz
Construction Greening Camps
Photos by Edmund Summer