Open form enables the biourban city. An industrial city seemingly independent of its natural environment is replaced by a living organism. Paracity is a modular urban structure system based on the use of a glue-laminated solid wood grid, a sort of primary framework, within which people can build their homes, create communities and establish cultivations. Organic by nature, Paracity is capable of growing unaided on urban wastelands such as fl oodlands or slums. This autonomous biourban growth is made possible by modular environmental technology, which provides the necessary ’internal organs’ for the communities created in the process. Paracity is designed to receive, process and convert the waste generated by urban centres into a resource.  It serves as an acupuncture needle in the side of a polluting city. The third-generation city represents the organic ruins of the industrialised city. The existing symbioses between Taipei’s collective gardens, urban cultivations and illegal settlements and the surrounding city are fragments of the third-generation city. These areas serve as the city’s acupuncture points piercing through its industrial skin to reach local knowledge. Drawing upon and committed to this resource, the third-generation city grows to become part of nature. Paracity is the seed of a third-generation city.  A modular biourban organism grows in response to human needs while at the same time ruining the surrounding industrial city. Seeds of Paracity are germinating within Taipei in the collective gardens, illegal settlements, abandoned burial grounds and other undeveloped sites. These seeds will contribute to the biological rehabilitation of the surrounding city through urban acupuncture. From these points, Paracity will spread out along the covered river and irrigation channels. Ultimately, the biourban organism and the static city will reach a biologically sustainable equilibrium that will give birth to the third-generation city.
 
 
Marco Casagrande (1971) is a Finnish architect, environmental artist and social theorist. Casagrande’s works and teaching are moving freely in-between architecture, environmental art, urban and environmental design and science, and circus adding up into cross-over architectural thinking of «Commedia dell’architettura». He views architects as design shamans merely interpreting what the bigger nature of the shared mind is transmitting.