The Machine City

Yen-Ting Lin

This project envisions a form of urbanism composed of a series of hyper‐private gigantic blocks, each with its own entirely autonomous infrastructure. As a mini city that is roughly equivalent to four to six Manhattan blocks, each block has its own infrastructure, such as water supply, sewage treatment, energy supply and internal transportation systems. The urban model is not required to integrate into large public utility networks, and can freely extend through private aggregation. In this ”Machine City” proposal, the urban grid idea is reexamined and retrofitted into a highly dense, mix‐used, and pedestrian‐friendly urban complex. Each block offers what a city entails, including offices, residential units, entertainments, street life, hotels, parks and recreational centers.

In the 21st century, societies around the world appear to be continuing to develop the ideologies of neoliberalism by becoming increasingly privatized. Iconic environments of 21st century urbanism, such as Dubai have foregone the provision of public utilities like a shared sewage system. This project considers a near future urbanism in which every urban block can truly stand alone. Unlike a closed market manipulated by the government and imposed heavy restrictions on planning development, once infrastructure becomes privately created and is no longer invisible structure, at the scale of the city block, each “machine city” generates its own value and offers an ideal opportunity to develop personalized infrastructural identity, transforming into a space of aesthetic expression. Competition might also arise between blocks. Each block is described as a visual infrastructural aesthetic, because it works towards its own vision and creates abundant opportunities for individuals to develop unique identities. In this way, each block can also will determine its own unique life style. Each block can enjoy more autonomy and freedom to leverage resources, and focus more on economic growth and efficiency. Organically, each block fosters its own individual characteristic and specialization.

This new building prototype functions as a city within a city. The dimension is around 300 x 200 meters. In this gigantic block, the base is a parking lot, and highly compact infrastructure is built inside of it, including water supply, sewage treatment and energy supply, ensuring that each individual block is selfsufficient. Inter‐block transportation is also available to not only facilitate traffic flows, but also make traveling more convenient between blocks. On the new level of “Machine City”, each building has two typologies. There are commercial programs that can provide daily use and public spaces that connect to the public transportation, and on the top of them are a multitude of housing options and employment opportunities. Therefore, it is a unit inside a unit, a city made up of blocks within a block. It’s a systematic way to organize the entire city into module units. In this way, each block has its own purpose and theme to make it function differently from others. When urban population increases, it is more efficient to just add more block prototypes to the existing infrastructure. Hence, the idea is highly applicable to fast growing cities like Dubai, where most areas are undeveloped but the demand to develop is high. This block prototype fits well in this era of rapid urbanization, because of its own infrastructure and circulation.

From another perspective, the “Machine City” model challenges the existing understanding of what constitutes public and private. With the emerging idea of hyper‐privatization, the public property between private lands become private, and more private investors share whole properties. This city block is able to assert its autonomy by building its own self‐sufficient infrastructure, which further improves efficiency, provides newly privatized services, and benefits investors. Also, all buildings are located within walking distance, about a 15‐minute walk for a round trip. This model promotes commercial activities, encourages social interactions, and elevates space efficiency.

This “Machine City” proposal intends to create a highly dense city block through collectiveness of personalized infrastructure while enriching the lives of city dwelling, providing people with new life styles, as well as job and entertainment opportunities. It organizes a city through individual blocks. Each block carries its own identity, and together brings diversity to the city. It re‐defines the relationship between individual blocks and a city. Blocks are also inter‐connected that create a more comprehensive unity.

Live-work housing, Hengyang Wings group

The houses, covering an area about the size of three football pitches, were built in 2009 on the roof of a multi-storey construction materials and furniture mall in Hengyang. Pictures show the houses – with bright blue roofs and pastel yellow walls – mixing architectural styles, with wraparound verandahs and some having vaguely Germanic towers attached. They are divided by white picket fences, while trees and bushes grow in their courtyards and along the pathways between them.

Source: www.scmp.com

Redium

9 Taipei Main Station, C. Y. Lee

The Taipei Bus Station integrates a business hotel, an international shopping center, high-end office buildings, and metropolitan residential units into a composite city development program on top of the function of a bus depot.

Integrated with the residential, hotel, office, commercial, transportation, arts, and leisure functions, this new city center provides an all-encompassing living network.

Source: www.cylee.com

Peter Trummer is University Professor at the University of Innsbruck and holds the Chair of the Institute of Urban Design – ioud.

This book has been financed by the Institute of Urban Design – IOUD, University of Innsbruck.

All content was produced by the EDGE “Design of Cities” program at the Southern Californian Institute of Architecture - SCI-Arc, for a design research project directed by Peter Trummer and assisted by Begüm Baysun and Wiliam Virgil in 2016.

Participants: Javier Cardiel, Zeynep Cinar, Jonathan Cooper, Esra Durukan, Dennis Dong Yeop Ham, Yagmur Kaptan, Meeghan Lee, Yen-Ting Lin, Siva Sepehry Nejad, Adrienne Ott, Hyoseon Park, Marco Tadros

Editor: Peter Trummer

Production: Peter Trummer, Sven Winkler

Layout: Peter Trummer, Sven Winkler, Sophie C. Krause

IMPRESSUM

2017

IOUD

Institute of Urban Design / Universtität Innsbruck Univ.-Prof. Peter Trummer Technikerstraße 21c 6020 Innsbruck AUSTRIA