Mulletowning | Buffalo Creek, West Virginia

High above the dramatically exurban Appalachian "Hollow" company mining towns of West Virginia, large new swatches of developable land are being created as flattened mountaintop (ex)mining sites become dormant and reclamated. The dramatic mining techniques particularly of the last quarter century provide a new opportunity for the residents of these defunct mining towns to reintegrate with their immediate surroundings as well as the larger socio-economic landscape. Mulletowning posits an archi-infrastructural planning and design strategy whose impetus is to redevelop these former mining Hollow communities through interconnecting them with the reclamated mountaintop mining sites above, agglomerating passive as well as active infrastructures, farming, marketplace, campus, and civic and leisure spaces from which the community can develop in a sustainable and interactive manner. As with the nature of the site, the viability of Mulletowning is in its coupling of the seemingly disparate elements of urban and rural, local and external, natural and social. Mulletowning is a stitch across a wounded natural, socio-economic, and cultural landscape, positing a new urban+rural framework for new post-industrial frontiering.