Connecting Barcelona

RS1_EMERGENT TERRITORIES Willy Muller+Maite Bravo Carolina Libardi Daniela Quesada Erina Filipovska

[WORK IN PROGRESS]

Connecting Barcelona

LIMITS: THE DIAGRAM The site is located in the city of Barcelona, in one of the most important urban parks of the city. It also includes the Estación de Francia, the oldest train station in Spain, and the zoo. The Ronda Litoral, a highly used highway, also known as B-10, crosses the site in it’s central part.

LIMITS: THE PLAN

VISUAL DISCONNECTIVITY

PHYSICAL DISCONNECTIVITY

[Ronda Litoral: The Conection Element as the Agent of Urban Fragmentation]

Hinging the program of the zoo across ronda to ciutadella park and pier/beach area.

Zoo within Ciutadella Park: programmatic opportunity.

The extents of the site: to include both parks and extend the zoo to a future marine zoo onto the piers.

Park as connector/intermediator between parts of the city.

Schematic Proposal

Humans and Transportation

The Cars of Today

Power Source

The fact is that the present system of cars has quite literally well past its use-by date. Traffic is inefficient, vehicles are expensive, parking is expensive, and the technology upon which cars are based is about alter forever. In this environment, literally anything can get on the table as a working proposition, if it can prove itself commercially viable.

Chassis Frame

The new vehicles will be nothing like the current model sedans, and they’re not envisaged to be operating in the same environment. The roads of the future are very unlikely to be cluttered with a menagerie of ultra-inefficient, ultra-expensive piles of scrap metal which cost a fortune to run both on and off the road and are unbelievably dangerous.

Humans and Transportation

The Cars of the Future

SOME OF THE IDEAS CURRENTLY BEING FLOATED ARE: • Plastic cars • Community cars • Cars using nanotechnology • Fold up cars • Fan belt re-chargers • Robot cars that can drive themselves • Smart roads that can prevent accidents • Plastic roads – cheaper and easier to replace and can also include built-in sensors

Cars of the future will be green in ways that can’t even be imagined today. Even now, as the first generations of highpowered electrical car like are just hitting the production lines, and there’s already talk of a car which is basically pretty similar to a cell phone, complete with a whole range of apps. Even car insurance is evolving, moving from the antiquated dinosaur like the corporate models to customized insurance.The sheer number of new ideas coming off CAD drawing boards in the last few years indicates a major global rethink of the whole idea of personal transport.

The really interesting thing about these ideas is that just about all of them are possible with current technology.

With the current developments in nanotechnology, self-repairing cars are also quite possible, at least able to seal leaks and cracks using advanced polymer and carbon fiber technology.

Humans and Transportation

The Roads of the Future

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2.5m

1.2m TRANSPORTATION IN THE FUTURE- SOLUTION TO ELIMINATE TRAFFIC JAMS 75-80% of the cars in traffics has only one passenger and that’s the driver. In the future, it’ll be impossible for roads to host such a great number of cars if things continue this way.

Here is the creation of a new collective, automated infrastructure, which is called MOM. The system is based on a singleseated vehicle (extendible to two persons) and powered by combination magnetic and electricity; the system is designed to conserve energy in order to maintain sustainable automotive futures

2.5m

Humans and Transportation

The Roads of the Future

As we move away from an economy dependent on fossil fuels and into one based on information then how will that affect the roads of the future? Most likely they will be used to carry massive amounts of information through fiber optics that run under or alongside them or whatever becomes the new means of transferring information. What else though? Tolls? Privatization by huge companies such as Microsoft more interested in the flow of information? Roads being owned by out of state entities who might restrict access to certain areas?

It will be many decades until roads are possibly no longer used by society. Too many people enjoy driving and enjoy cars as a status symbol or toy. Many people do not like public transportation. Public transit fails to transport people to very specific locations, such as a cul-de-sac road. Even with light rails today, most people still need a car to drive. Driving in a car gives you the most freedom possible in choosing where you want to go and when. Public transit is severely limited to one, two or a few pre-determined tracks.

Roads may indeed be forever. The personal vehicle known as the car may not.

Those Roman roads weren’t intended for cars--most of what they carried was foot traffic, and the occasional animal-drawn wagon or horse rider, at speeds not much faster than walking. Roads are ancient--cars, and high-speed travel, are not. If you want a reasonable future for roads, imagine roads where automobiles exist in some form, but they share the road with other forms of transportation--pedestrians, bicycles, public transit on rubber tires or metal rails. That doesn’t require much imagination, because it is just the sort of streets that were common in cities and towns during the first half of the 20th century. Other ideas about roads: If we can stop the rain of toxic fluids from the bottoms of autos in one form or another, imagine permeable road surfaces that don’t need gutters, allowing the soil beneath to absorb rainwater instead of using sewers. There are ideas for solar highways that encase solar panels under transparent road surfaces, or above or aside the right-of-way, to power streetlights, signs or adjoining neighborhoods. Roads in cities and towns designed as complete streets, with shaded and protected pedestrian right-of-way, bike lanes, and a central space for autos as part of the urban traffic mix. Gridded, interconnected street systems, instead of culde-sac/feeder models, allow more variety of travel and encourage walking and transit use while still remaining practical for automobiles. Multitraffic on one integrated road system is definitely something to ponder. We also see roads getting smaller as cars as we know it are getting smaller. The micro-road. Building upward maybe for different type of vehicle traffic? Who knows, maybe one day we won’t even need vehicles and goods and persons could just be transported across roads. Like giant air slides.

Humans and Transportation

The Roads of the Future

So how about solar roadways? Are they a roads of future? Why use roads just for driving and collecting tolls, why don’t we use them for collecting energy. Of course, nowadays roads can’t be used for collecting energy but Solar Roads could.

US Department of Transportation recently awarded $100,000 to Solar Roadways to build prototype of first ever Solar Road Panel. So how does these future world roads work?

“The Solar Road Panels will contain embedded LEDs which “paint” the road lines from beneath to provide safer nighttime driving, as well as to give up to the minute instructions (via the road) to drivers (i.e. “detour ahead”).

The road will be able to sense wildlife on the road and can warn drivers to “slow down”. There will also be embedded heating elements in the surface to prevent snow and ice buildup, providing for safer winter driving. This feature packed system will become an intelligent highway that will double as a secure, intelligent, decentralized, self-healing power grid which will enable a gradual weaning from fossil fuels.Replacing asphalt roads and parking lots with Solar Roadway panels will be a major step toward halting climate change. Fully electric vehicles will be able to recharge along the roadway and in parking lots, finally making electric cars practical for long trips.”

It is estimated that is will take roughly five billion 12’’ by 12’’ Solar Road Panels to cover the asphalt surfaces in the U.S. alone, That amount of Solar Road Panels can produce three times more power than U.S. ever used.

We just can’t wait to see more of these roads all over the world in the near future.

Conceptual Proposal