The urban palimpsest: speculative collage as a critical method in architectural design research

Purpose This article examines the social, spatial and ecological impacts of rapid urbanisation in the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA) through the artwork The Urban Palimpsest. It aims to reveal hidden mechanisms of capital-driven spatial production, and reposition visual production as an active critical practice capable of engaging public discourse on sustainable urban futures in China. Design/methodology/approach The research adopts speculative collage as a hybrid design research method. Five large-scale collages are produced by cutting and grafting satellite images from 11 GBA cities. Each collage focuses on a specific urban issue, including manufacturing flows, gated communities, vertical modernity, the survival of urban villages and infrastructure-driven spatio-temporal compression. Image, text and sound are combined to construct an immersive experience. Findings The collages expose a fragmented urban condition defined by functionalist violence: labour exploitation in global manufacturing, social segregation in gated communities, symbolic capital in vertical monuments, marginalisation of urban villages and ecological costs of infrastructure-driven compression. Originality/value Situated between theoretical critique, speculative design and social intervention, the project expands the methodological potential of collage beyond representation to a critical project. It extends analogical and montage-based practices from architectural and urban fragments to the scale of the mega-city region, proposing a means of constructing and testing an urban grammar. It demonstrates how visual practice can transform into public dialogue, ultimately repositioning design research as a form of social intervention and “authorship without aura”.