notes about sustainability
Supersatellites – Sustainability
Megablocks: sustainability, social spaces…Cultural Revolution running things out
Possible interventions:
Light: fiber optics, low energy, LED
Food: integrating food: vertical farms in the city, bioshelters, tilapia wastewater used to fertilize plants. Growing sprouts, require less pesticide. Nutrition focus.
Tangible version of DD
Exhibition is a catalyst for case study
Compact city thinking
McKinsey 1 billion report: gain 1% GDP by stopping the development of satellite cities.
DCF: No new cities. If up to 5 million, one can manage a city.
Cannot, however, ignore the reality/success of the satellite city.
If unsuccessful, ghost towns; if too successful MUD
Can we see DD in action? Lacking time to plan.
Speed becomes a luxury when you can anticipate future growth. Make a city work.
What is catalyzing change?
- policy/lack thereof
- carbon-neutrality kind of bogus
- climate-conscious communities
- making up for choices
Socioeconomics; rise of ecological civilization
Integrate ecosystem services as part of the flux
Prioritize clean water v. social intervention; biodiversity v. social intervention
Water levels in the North have dropped over 200m
North: compact; not allowing water to recharge
Prioritizing in terms of location
- Other units of analysis that could change
Carbon minded development
Building between Beijing and Tianjin
Climactic change
- Himalayas stop producing glaciers
100 years in southwest: sea levels
Different environmental shifts/density; adaptation
2011 – ecological civilization
Country-by-country level
Beijing masterplan nationwide
Tianjin Economic Development Association: technological collaboration
No idea of redevevelopments
Experiment – ‘do something,’ no brief.
RAND – multiuse buildings
Google Earth/Sketch Up
- slick presentational tool; easy virtual reality
Collaboration for scientific knowledge…
Polycon: remote interactivity; multi-IP
Effective charrette leads to exhibition
Gravity: threshold. Something falls out; bits flying off
Expanding/flattening out
Different teams develop different parts
Realism
Policy – design challenge; if you follow current Chinese planning/building rules, you cannot make a green city
Urban texture: cell – half-road, half-sidewalk
Pedestrian friendliness
Urban rooms: flexible parking systems
- extending from the backbone
- effective green rooms
- continuous urban space
Green zones
-waterfront possible, terraces showing
- scaled up
- never redeveloped
Detailed urban typology
Photoshop architecture
- forget building codes
- every transition is a shift in policy
- allow them to do more
- sustainability suggests getting rid of regulation
- what can a designer do
taking away certain constraints…working 15-20-25 years in advance…
- Offset footprint
- zoning
- regional scale
- regulations
- inevitable that one team will have to work on a level scale
Start 100 years in the future and go backwards? Add constraints as you approach the present
Beginning team and end team at either rend?
Must not be boring; sense of possibility and one-liners. Give site/tools and nothing else.
Holistic planning – about other people and things
- what happens when designers have free reign
- in a bubble; wants it that way?
Midsize city – cut a corner
- assuming some sort of urban gravity
- villages not related to the citiy
- urban core/in between/outside
One corner reflected four ways in a mirror
- double the city
Green edge
- make ¼ of a model; reflected in mirrors
Every team must add 60,000 people
Have more wind and solar energy
Reduce energy
Stuck on coal; can reduce?
Grids can be effective
- but towers, towers, towers; skyline focus. But if that doesn’t happen, it still works
Figure out what resource/space thresholds are
Smoothly mirror the corners
8 teams: video allows patching-up pieces. Like a pre-city. Make a pie chart; collage them back together. Stick things together.
Reveal – pull back version of city. Each one does something else.
Each team has a different blank slate
- traffic/pedestrian/transition
- ecosystem
- different approaches
Policy sprawl
- constraint on space needed for low-income housing
- social constraints
- local retailers
Overlay 30 policy constraints: add one, take one away
Constraint vs. temporal
Defining constraints
- transitions between
- Venn diagram
20 years post-interventions
- planning necessary for design possibility
constraints
- reduction of heat
- water
- permeable surfaces
-noise
- human health
- urban space
- green space
- public space
- waste
- air pollution
- alternative energy
- electric hybrids
- particular matter count
- air flow in buildlings
- coal plants
air-flow stoppage; super-windy buildings.
Shape? Vertical green spaces absorb reflective surfaces; increase reflected surfaces
Policy v. top-down
“Green Olympics” idealism
- more formalizing as it scales down
imaginary – sustainable development; can it be, vs. doing development in a sustainable way…and what are the differences
constraints: 50% interior lighting; 80% of light in the daytime must be natural…
- shade issue
Intensely green city
- integrated urban proposal
- open the door
Eight proposals, 7 teams?
Productive difference
Architects need to design policy
Going backwards and forwards in time?
