This proposal accepts three facts.
A) Urban sprawl* is happening, and it has been continuously growing everywhere on a large scale since 25 years ago. Urban sprawl is not a problem in itself, but it contains several challenges that need to be tackled: everything is more distant, which means people spend more time on daily migrations; it also implicates more car dependency and more pollution to be produced with it. All these issues are easily solved with accurate public transportation schemes. However, if the cities grow in a disorganized way, there is no rule to implement this scheme. Our point here is to organize the urban sprawl rather than fight over it.
B) There’s neither a way to accurately predict the cities’ evolution in terms of footprint and population nor to block them into a “small-mid size city” state.
In this situation of unpredictability, designing a future city is useless. We propose to design a flexible city system for a future we don’t know.
C) In the contemporary (and future) world, cities are limitless. That’s why our system focuses on a 3.14 km2 area (as a “sample”), but it’s extensible to the Yilong region – it’s an intercity system.
In order to organize the sprawl, we assume the water line as the driving source for urban development. If we can do it, we conduct the urban extension through a linear organization (instead of a “blot” random extension). This linear organization determines the path line for the main intercity public transportation system, which is then complemented by secondary perpendicular lines. At the same time, considering the terrain level is roughly constant in the waterfront areas, this line is able to incorporate comfortable and flat running and cycling paths connecting the different urban areas.
It’s not a futuristic idea. On the contrary, at this point, we assume it’s a return to the ancestral way of creating towns – close to the water, where the topography is softer, the agricultural soil is better, and irrigation is easier. Even being ancestral, this strategy could be the key, not just for the transportation scheme but also for the very urgent and present-day problem of the cities’ feeding. Assuming the rupture of old limits between countryside and cities, nature and buildings, the agricultural production to feed the urban areas doesn’t need to be placed outside of them. They could be mixed, reducing the time, the cost, and the pollution associated with the transportation between the plantation fields and their final products´ destination. At the same time, these agricultural areas may also serve as public-use green spaces (as public agricultural parks) within the cities.
Within this strategy, we propose a system that works properly in three different future scenarios – low, medium, and high density occupations — composed by:
– a line of urban extension through the Liuyang River, connecting the Lutun Community with Wantunzhen city;
– a public transportation train system corresponding to this line;
– a grid of 100 m2 per inhabitant (it changes per scenario) of agricultural spaces, each 3 km in this line extension; these spaces will work as public spaces, functioning also as recreational green parks and train stations;
This system is flexible and adaptive over time to the number of people who are using it. The linear transportation scheme and its perpendicular complements can easily be adapted to different densities of population we may have in those areas: the transportation scheme can be transformed from a green walking park to an autonomous, driverless bus; the skeleton construction system allows us to nearly independently upgrade the existing green agricultural towers. The agricultural grids can be vertically extended according to population growth, ensuring the self-sufficiency of the urban space in terms of green food products and overlapping the recommended minimum surface area per inhabitant of public green space.
* meaning the enlargement of the cities’ footprint, including areas with low-density population.
