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Hillrise Flytipping Commons

Caroline Wells

Profile picture of Caroline Wells

Having graduated from Edinburgh with an undergraduate degree in architecture, I have moved through practice into my master's with a continued interest in community involvement, sustainability and anarchic practices as a means towards circularity.

Having graduated from Edinburgh with an undergraduate degree in architecture, I have moved throug...

This project critiques exploitative labor and environmental harm, proposing a craft-based, leisure-driven alternative. Rooted in slowness and joy, it embraces community-led creativity as resistance to productivity culture. Inspired by flytipped waste and informal DIY urban furniture, it reimagines discarded materials as valuable resources, celebrating the ingenuity of DIY practices born from precarity—where fractured communities, lacking institutional support, transform waste into shared, joyful spaces. These acts of reuse are not just sustainable, but expressions of resilience and imagination. Through collective making and shared leisure, the project envisions a neighborhood renewed by care, collaboration, and a reclaimed relationship to time and labor.

Final work

This image shows a playful collage of drawings of people/places/things in my neighbourhood

Research and process

These images show furniture which has been flytipped in my neighbourhood, and then reclaimed and deconstructed, showing a large amount of material

Drawing on the language of reuse, repair, and creative reimagining Hillrise residents use to uplift the surroundings of our overlooked neighbourhood in North London, and the prevalence of flytipping as an act of sharing in Hillrise, this work examines how these flytipped objects might be deconstructed into usable materials, then reconstructed into objects providing much-needed social infrastructure. The act of taking apart these pieces of furniture and laying them out at once reveals the material richness, and the world of potential they hold, were they valued differently than mere objects of waste.

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Hillrise Flytipping Commons

This project critiques exploitative labor and environmental harm, proposing a craft-based, leisure-driven alternative. Rooted in slowness and joy, it embraces community-led creativity as resistance to productivity culture. Inspired by flytipped waste and informal DIY urban fur...

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