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2006 dubai + Gold Coast
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DUBAI IN EVERY CITY: The Waterfront + Speculative Real Estate Aimee Chang Homogenization of place is occurring globally at the expense of local context. Dubai is selling itself as the 21stcentury prototype global city, founded on excessive consumption of mass tourism and speculative construction. Dubai is presented by its architecture as “consumable, replaceable, disposable, and short-lived.” And architects are propagating this unsustainable, exploitative, and repressive phenomenon in cities worldwide!
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Is this all that architecture has to offer society today? Gold Coast is Australia’s fastest-growing city in terms of population growth and construction. 42km of natural coastline has been expanded by a factor of 10 along manmade canals to construct the most expensive real estate in the state. The morphology of the seascape and landscape is so fabricated that you cannot distinguish between the natural and constructed. The type of waterfront real estate development taking place in Dubai can be found in other emerging cities around the world. There is a Dubai in every developing city!
1 Dubai: Prototype 21st Century? 2 1960s Creek: Dubai 3 1990s - 1990s Expansion: Dubai 4 Projected Development of Waterfront: Dubai 5 Fabricated Iconic Landscape: Dubai 6 Lot Selection: Dubia 7 Dubai in Every City: Gold Coast Australia 8 Queensland Australia Coastline: Gold Coast 9 Surfer’s Paradise Coastline: Gold Coast 10 Canal Estates Coastline: Gold Coast 11 Fabricated Iconic Landscape: Gold Coast 12 Lot Selection: Gold Coast
The marginal, even if extended, void requires a new conceptualization that could invest more sense and meaning to the possible forms of public space related to the different practices of the territory. The changing geographies of centrality relegate the traditional forms of public spaces to tourist attractions, or as peripheral and insignificant. My hypothesis is that today the relations between the fundamental elements of territorial support and its uses are in a state of crisis, often deprived of any effective meaning whatsoever, as if a hiatus had been introduced between the land’s infrastructure and its society. Not only is there the crisis of what many perceived as a model of territorial, social, and economic organization, which obliges us to rethink the existing relations between society and territory, but the reasons for this crisis are also enrooted in the here and now.
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The idea of territory as infrastructure solidifies and becomes concrete in the fundamental elements of its support: the natural and artificial water regime and road systems. Through these elements, we can read many of the processes of rationalization that were realized in the course of time, the various ideologies that inspired them, the various images of modernization that were pursued, and the crisis that affects them, and see a growing distance between a support constituted over a long period and society with its contemporary needs and desires. In what ways is water a shared or a fought-over resource in the dispersed territory of Veneto? How can it participate in the construction of a new landscape for living? About Water Rationalizations In this context it is important to recognize the various processes during which different forms of rationalities have been posited in the form of concrete infrastructure and objects. Today, this transformation and modernization process appears extraordinarily accelerated and requires the development of new hypotheses. “Water” includes natural and artificial flows, reclamation and irrigation devices, and draining systems. Water may not always be visible but is the underlying reason for the construction of the territory around Venice. The institutional representation of the metropolitan area itself nearly coincides with the drainage basin of the lagoon, the territory whose superficial waters enter the lagoon of Venice or have been deviated from it in the period of the Venetian Republic. The empty space of today’s lagoon remains at the center of the territory around, as it was when 16th-century hydraulic sciences were born in Venice. “Rational” here is used in the sense that society decided in a specific historical moment that a certain type of territorial modification
was useful and started a process of improvement. Different layers are stacked upon one another, often reversing the point of view and the idea of what had to be considered rational: large or incremental investments, as in the Roman aggeratio or in its pervasive and continuous modification over centuries; exercises of collective and individual power to reach collective or individual scopes, as in the transformations of the industrial and agricultural models; and the expression of changing ideologies.
In the 16th century, the second big attempt to rationalize the waters, the great diversion of rivers entering the lagoon, was started by the Venetian Republic in order to avoid filling the protective water surface with sand and gravel brought from the northern mountains. Rivers were displaced to the east and west of the lagoon and new canals were built in an incredible effort that is at the origin of the new science of hydrology. This moment also marks the entry of Venice into a new phase of globalization, more interested in land and agriculture than in sea commerce. The outcome of the long debate opposing “the reasons of the land” to “the reasons of the sea” came out in a new phase of rationalization. In the 1930s, the third moment of rationalization, during the Fascist period, big works of reclamation invested the low wet areas around the lagoon with procedures of polderization not unlike the Dutch ones. The works were strong enough to change completely the physical and ecological character of the land, using complex systems of dikes, ditches, and pumping stations, to create new areas for industrial agriculture.
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If in the middle wet plain the problem is to expel the water, in the dry plain it is to bring it in to provide irrigation, avoiding its immediate infiltration into the water table. In a beautiful map by Anton Von Zach, made at the beginning of the 19th century, a system of canals was represented as an interconnected mesh. During the 1930s, the continuous mesh was transformed into a network of concrete canals, a tree structure in which the relation between vegetation and water was lost, and the accessibility to the cultivated fields was limited. This transformation was also the consequence of a wider project of industrialization: a new alliance between big industry, which needed electricity and power to develop the new petrochemical pole of Porto Marghera, and the farmers of the dry plain. Big dams were built in the mountains that needed important engineering works, and part of the water was given to new industrial agriculture developed out of a “desert of gravel” in the dry plain, depriving the Piave River of almost all its water. The landscape changed: The earth canal with trees on both sides disappeared or remained only as a fragment, and the new network of concrete reduced the agricultural richness and biodiversity of the area with a strong simplification of traditional associations. The comparison of the two structures, the mesh and the tree structure, on a contemporary map, shows the conflict between the two different ideas of rational use of water. Onsite, the contrast is even more striking: One discovers the conflicting relation between them and the difficulty in making them work together. About Centrality and Public Space Starting from the complex system of waters and from the need of a safer territory, our design research explores the possibility of giving more space to the water, both for stocking it and to prevent flooding. It envisages the integration of low-lying, cultivated land along a river, or abandoned gravel pits turned into water reservoirs and canals in a new system of open spaces for public and collective practices. How does centrality match with the idea of a dispersed territory? In an isotropic territory, is a dispersed system of water storage more rational then one big basin?
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The roughly 700 hectares called Prà dei Gai are a natural depression that can have an important role in guided flooding operations on the Livenza river. Its tributary, the Meduna (an alpine river, different from the Livenza, which is a quiet river that originates from a spring), has very dangerous floods, and when it reaches the main river the force of its waters obstructs the flowing of the Liv-
Each rationalization created its own landscape: The aggeratio attaches a drainage system to a network of roads, rows of trees, and cultivated fields divided by minor draining lines. More recently, in the last four decades, it has also organized a landscape of houses and industries along the roads, and its pres-
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CASE STUDY CU 67
In a very short and simplified overview, one can recognize three main moments of rationalization in strict relation with the geological, topographical, and hydrogeological features, following which we can divide the plain into three strips from north to south: the dry plain of gravel crossed by alpine rivers; the middle wet plain below the spring line; the lower wet plain up to the lagoon. The first important rationalization was the Roman centuriatio: Starting from the 2nd century B.C., it developed simultaneously as a drainage system, plot subdivision, and road infrastructure. Along the middle wet plain, the centuriatio turns at different angles to accommodate slopes that allow water to flow away from the impermeable ground.
ence helps to reveal the conditions in which a new economy of small and medium enterprises are initiated along the grid.