Ski is a satelite suburb of Oslo in Norway. Like many of Oslo’s satelite suburbs, it has a mediocre built environment with no clear statement as to how it will confront the surrounding natural landscape. Unlike most of the Oslo satelites suburbs, it has no access to the fjord and it is besieged by international motorways and railways.

What really differentiates Ski from the other suburbs though, is that it has been presented with an opportunity (as a result of its geographic location and proximity to other infrastructure)... The Scandinavians intend to link their major cities initially (and mainland Europe eventually) by high speed rail. The ‘8 Million City Project’.

Ski will receive a station. Ski will now be less than two hours from Oslo, Gothenburg in Sweden and Kobenhavn in Denmark! To ensure that anonymous Ski does not become a victim of the ‘8 Million City Project’ - due to its new proximity to these international hubs - I decided that Ski needed a marketable, differentiating identity. Something which could guide policy makers in their decision making.

currently the only visible trace of Ski’s raison d’etre is in its coat of arms - which was designed to reflect the original meaning of the name “Ski”. Ski = ‘running track for horse racing’, suggests that there may have been such a track on a farm in medieval times

To create this ‘identity‘, I romantically resuscitated Ski’s raison d’etre - ‘Ski’ is named after a large farm called ‘skeio’ which means running track for horses. This suggests that there may have been a horse racing facility at the farm during medieval times. A further observation I made is that commercial farming in neigbouring suburb As (less than 6km away) has resulted in farmers preferring to breed NRF (Norweigian Red) cattle on an industrial scale. This has resulted in other less commercially viable (but local) breeds’ populations decreasing to near extinction. I thus combined the two: Ski’s raison d’etre and the urgency to protect the regions’ local cow breeds to create a marketable, differentiating identity for Ski. A cow loop which is carefully integrated into the fabric to allow Ski to become an endangered-cow friendly city. The authorities may decide how best to develop this - Ski could become, for example, an intensive organic beef producer with slaghter houses and butcheries and restaurants and auction facilities for meat, prime bulls and semen... or Ski can become a passive ‘city-reserve’, where the cows are revered citizens (as in India).Nostalgia for the ‘past’, the ‘local’, the ‘neighbourhood’, the ‘traditional’ and the ‘home-grown’ can be used in a proactive manner to give a town an economy and identity that it has lost. Nostalgia to generate and regulate future commercial development in Ski!