wong oi ling ellena lillian chung kwan yu zicheng kai zhao las vegas, united states

To grow up, a city must root down. Imagining the city as a tree, while it thrives for economic growth, it needs nutrients and resources. Infrastructure construction and resource extraction has always been a top-down controlled operation. Cities have been conventionally growing skyward and determined by the market. What if a city’s roots can also grow organically and spontaneously downward to form the city’s operational backbone?

Root city emerges as Las Vegas faces water scarcity, urban sprawl, and wealth disparity. Located beneath the gambler’s city, root city is superimposed onto the existing water lines underneath the Las Vegas Strip as a way to interrupt both the capitalist system and physical configuration of a future city. It calls for bottom-up autonomy, co-ownership and co-development.

Since 2000, Las Vegas’ main source of drinking water—Lake Mead—has dropped more than 150 feet in water level. Meanwhile, the surge in Vegas’ homeless population has skyrocketed due to extreme capitalism, giving rise to a new community that seeks refuge in the forgotten system of underground tunnels – mole people. Inspired by this, root city describes a dystopian future scenario in 2120 with a looming water crisis and rampant homelessness. When money cannot buy water, the capital accumulated by the rich is useless. The city therefore decides to initiate an underground water diversion project and the mole people of Las Vegas become the opportunistic labor for this project.

Mole people and the government would collaborate to expand the underground infrastructure network. The empowerment of the mole people during construction of the infrastructure also induces a makeshift self-evolved autonomous underground settlement. Gradually, the once marginalized population becomes the major force operating the most important source of life – water for the upper city, accelerating their social bargaining power. The upper city and the underground city are manifested as symbiosis. The upper city depends upon nutrients from the underground for survival; the underground also needs resources from the upper city. A dynamic counterweight is thus formed to capitalism.