STUDENTS Urban Planning Mayra López Food Sherine Zein Water Ilkim Er Energy Seda Tugutlu Matter Mohit Chaugule Housing Çaglar Gökbulut STUDIO PROFESSORS Vicente Guallart Rodrigo Rubio STUDIO ASSISTANTS Ruxandra Iancu Alessio Verdolino
Facilities Chiara Dall’Olio Public Space Chenghuai Zhou Transportation Rahul Pudale
The Self-Sufficient City: Neigborhood Prototype With the growth expectations of global urban population in the coming years and taking into account that cities contribute 70% of the world’s CO2 emissions, rethinking the city for a better environmental performance is now a priority in the global agenda. World society has grown in cities, urban life is supposed to represent amplitude of opportunities for its inhabitants yet most have not evolved to respond to the demands of life in community. As cities continue to grow, new questions arise: how can the city of the XXI century become sustainable? what are the conditions that will enable the development of cities for the future?
ble. This allowed us to approach every layer without the constraints of culture, economy or regulations in order to obtain sustainability guidelines that could be applied to any city in the world. As a conclusion, the development and design of the self-sufficient neighborhood prototype made evident that in order to attain an efficient urban environment it is necessary to defy the existing rules of production and management of resources in the way they have worked until now. Although it would take time to invert processes, an effort from all different agents must be made to convert cities into liveable and sustainable habitats that respond to the environmental reality we live today.
Throughout history, cities have been put under the scope; its conditions and components have undergone an excessive study. However, nowadays the availability of information and methods of obtaining data have enabled all types of agents from the most diverse backgrounds to study cities. Architects and urbanists are not an exception because of the big role they play on the materialization of the city. In the occasion of the first Master of City and Technology in IAAC, the Studio tutored by Vicente Guallart and Rodrigo Rubio, posed an even bigger question: can a city be self-sufficient? To answer this, we examined the city as living organism. Starting from its anatomical systems, a deep research was developed around the main systems that keep the city functioning: water, energy, matter and mobility. This was backed up by studies centered on urban fabrics and the distributions of public spaces, facilities, housing and tertiary activities inside the city. The aim of this was to understand how the supply chain works for each cycle and how it affects the behavior and physical composition of the city. Thus, giving us insights about how by changing the metabolic processes of these cycles, we would be able to invert relations and make the city more autonomous but also more efficient in terms of resource management. The exercise was not developed in a specific place, and although some variables from Barcelona were used (mainly environmental: weather, rainfall, radiation, etc.) the aim was to be as abstract as possi5
If there is to be a ‘new urbanism’ it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infrastructure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions – the reinvention of psychological space. Since the urban is now pervasive, urbanism will never again be about the new only about the more and the modified. It will not be about the civilized, but about underdevelopment. Rem Koolhaas ‘What Ever Happened to Urbanism?’ (1994) S,M,L,XL / OMA”
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Urban Planning
Evolution of the city
The evolution of the city has been studied throughout time because as economy and society have changed, city models have as well. When thinking about the self-sufficient city, the aim was to find the model that allowed the city to work most efficiently in terms of distribution of infrastructure and also population. Thus, the research was started by looking at the historical evolution of cities and how these models affect on behaviours and resource consumption.
where modernist architects and urbanists proposed the compostion of a city where all functions were limited and apart from each other. This didn’t solve the problem of mobility since people had to depend on cars to reach any destination either for work or leisure. Although not many cities adopted the modernist model to the extreme, it has been discovered that the decentralized and centralized models of cities cause much harm to the environment in terms of efficiency and distribution of resources. The mandatory mobility in the biggest cities also has terrible consequences in social interction levels.
As starting point of western civilization, the Greek polis was planned to function in what would later be referred to as the cartesian space (x and y planes). The various infrastructures that support the life in the city (supply, evacuation, transportation and communication) used to function on a single level until the Romans conceived the aqueduct system to supply their territories with potable water. With this, they opened the possibility for infrastructure to be conceived on another level (z plane), functioning independently but always in service of the built environment. The cities of antiquity and the middle ages were centralized, they had physical limits (outer protection walls) which made them finite, unitary and controlable (a boiled egg).
Therefore, the city for the contemporary society must be a networked system just like the internet. When internet became a world wide phenomena, information started to be available for “everyone” mainly “everywhere”. Until then all the transformations in the city had been occurring on different levels but always the physical realm, later they became invisible. Cities are no longer just confined to their material presences: they have become both digital and digitised. Still physical yet remote, these new technologies transform the vision we have of space and also of ourselves. Citizens are no longer only inhabitants but also users and have the ability of influencing on their built environment through the creation and use of data.
However, when the Industrial Revolution brought unprecedented growth of the population of cities, the previous conditions were rendered as incapable to support the new density of the urban areas. The precarious life conditions of urban dwellers caused the citizens who could afford it to move their homes away from the center but to still depend on it for work. Thus, the boundaries of the city were blurred and the era of the machine began as innovations in transportation caused the population to depend on them. “The industrial city, which first developed in Great Britain, grew because of food supply, increasing population, advances in transportation, and the expansion of industrial production. All these factors were obviously interlinked with one another. It was the industrial city that laid the foundations for the modern city.”1 The modern city was deeply affected by the the invention and mass production of automobiles. As transportation became faster, distances became smaller and the areas of cities grew giving birth the decentralized city model, most seen in United States and known as sprawl.
Following this idea, the distributed city model adopted by Barcelona, is one of the most successful models in terms of sustainability. The city composed by self-sufficient and networked cells reduces mandatory mobility for its inhabitants by enabling mixed use and providing housing, work and leisure within a walkable distance of 500 - 1000 meters. This produces a compact, dense and sustainable city. In the search of conditions for a self-sufficient city it was determined that the prototype would be developed in the scale of the neighborhood because it is the base cell in which many facilites operate, and can be easily replicable in a larger scale.
As cities were not designed for automobiles, the congestion that they caused on the ground level of cities led to a separatist movement in the cities, 8
PLANNED CITY
PREDICTABLE CITY
static unitary hierarchical
limited recognizable precise
centralized
Population
Urban Area
16.8
2511
million
km2
Transport Carbon Emissions
CONTEMPORARY
METROPOLIS MODERN
CLASSIC
POLIS
METAPOLIS MUTATING CITY
complex variable interactive
decentralized
Population
Urban Area
8.8
2.5
4289
tons/person
million
km2
Transport Carbon Emissions
7.5 tons/person
1. City as an egg - Cedric Price / Metapolis history - Manuel Gausa 2. Network distribution - Paul Baran 3. Comparison of area, population and emissions of cities
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distributed
Population
Urban Area
2.8
162
million
km2
Transport Carbon Emissions
0.7 tons/person
Urban Planning
Prototype city
With the distributed model in mind, the prototype for the self-sufficient neighborhood was designed to be part of a larger system. A city composed of 100 neighborhoods of 25,000 inhabitants with dimensions of 1 km by 1 km. Together, these cells make a 2.5 million inhabitant city of 10 x 10 km. Each of them is cell sufficient but not independent, since each has to provide one big scale facility that works at a large scale to serve the whole population of the city.
“We hypothesize that the way cities and city neighborhoods are designed and maintained can have a significant impact on the happiness of city residents. The key reasons, we suggest, are that places can facilitate human social connections and relationships and because people are often connected to quality places that are cultural and distinctive. City neighborhoods are an important environment that can facilitate social connections and connection with place itself.�2
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City layers
global) organizations.�3 To produce the prototype, the research team was organized according to the cycles and layers that compose the city. Four out six of the main cycles were analyzed: matter, water, energy and mobility. Information and nature were conceived as inherent to all the layers. Yet, though food is part of the matter cycle, it was analysed by itself because it is a complex and important factor for self-sufficiency. In terms of the built environment, the themes of analysis were: housing, tertiary uses, facilities and public space.
A city is built by different systems that overlapped create a liveable artificial habitat. Throughout history, infrastructures inside and outside of cities have been layed out to make life in cities possible. These infrastructures correspond to the main survival needs and have been present since the first settlements came to exist: nature, water, energy, matter, mobility and information. “But how exactly are we to understand infrastructure, this new, now largely invisible compositional reality? By infrastructure one refers to every aspect of the technology of rational administration that routinizes life, action and property within larger (ultimately
information matter
water mobility energy buildings
nature
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Urban Planning
Design premises
1. LOCAL FOOD / NO ANIMAL CRUELTY Urban dwellers depend on the supply of food from the rural areas, since these processes happen outside of the urban realm most of them are unknown or ignored. With the growth of population, the demand has increased and supply must double to meet it. Intensive farming of crops and animals consume a vast amount of water and energy. If food is produced locally, the cost of transportation and production would be lowered and more people would be able to have access to food.
Food
2. INTELLIGENT WATER MANAGEMENT Water contamination and supply are constant problems in urban areas due to poor management of resources and insufficent infrastructure. Globally, there is a 40% gap between supply and demand.4 If water is managed in an intellingent way by functioning in a closed cycle, all the waste water can be treated and the withdrawal rate lowered to meet all the population’s needs.
Water
3. CLEAN ENERGY / ZERO EMISSIONS The production of energy occurs in plants outside the cities that often burn fossil fuels for power and in turn, increase CO2 emissions. Renewable energy systems used inside the city can produce less contamination and allow the system to be decentralized. Citizens could have the possibility of owning and managing their resources by producing and storing energy above and below their houses.
Energy
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4. ZERO WASTE / CIRCULAR ECONOMY The trash produced in cities usually goes to landfills outside the country of provenance. “In a circular economy, products and resources are reused to extract their maximum value rather than entering the waste stream.�5 The cycle of production and disposal can be inverted by giving the citizens the possibility of self fabrication, and in turn, recycling and reusing the waste produced inside the city.
Matter
5. NO PRIVATE CARS / SHARED TRANSPORTATION Automobiles and other transportation methods that use fossil fuels for power are the main contributors to pollution and cogestion in cities. Since citizens would have the priviledge of working near their residences, private cars would be replaced by shared electric cars for specific uses. This would also allow the city to give more space to pedestrians and bicycle riders.
Mobility
6. DIVERSITY Diversity is one of the most important characteristics in terms of sustainability at all scales. The mix of uses enables the appearance of events and also gives the citizens the power of choosing.
Planning
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Urban Planning
Urban Fabrics
To build a city from scratch, it is necessary to analyse different urban fabrics to evaluate their physical composition. Parameters such as the floor area ratio, coverage, density of population and dwellings, average block area and open space percentage allow the comparison between radically different fabrics. Since “(...) city blocks and their density are the units that define the rhythm of the city...�3, the design of blocks becomes relevant to formulate a sustainable anatomy.
Hyperblock or superblocks are units created by a supergrid that corresponds to a large scale but that at the same time is able to host a smaller scale grid inside itself that corresponds to smaller scales. As references, 6 examples from different parts of the world were chosen: Abu Dhabi, Barcelona, Islamabad, Melbourne and Taipei. Apart of being superblocks, each of them has specific characteristics that were found suitable to insert in the DNA of the self-sufficient prototype.
To intervene the cells of 1 km by 1 km, the analysis was centered on hyperblocks with similar dimensions to the conditions of the prototype.
Melbourne
Taipei
Prototype
Islamabad
Barcelona
Abu Dhabi
4,087,000
2,702,315
2,500,000
272 km2
250 km2
1,829,180
1,620,943
906 km2
102 km2
Population
1, 500,000
972 km2 Area (km2)
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Abu Dhabi U.A.E
Taipei Taiwan
24.29 N / 54.22 E Geometric Supergrid
25.02 N / 121.38 E Geometric Grid
Abu Dhabi and Taipei were chosen as example for their border condition. The hyperblocks are lined by tertiary high-rise buildings towards the edge where the scale of activities is larger and starts decreasing towards the center. However, the big difference between these resides on the mix of uses. In Abu Dhabi, the interior of the hyperblocks is composed by a low density single family housing whereas in Taipei there are “superblocks functioning as a solid structure with a big scale of activities, transportation and buildings in its peripheries, building up a typical orthogonal grid which becomes a flexible one inside of it: small alleys with smaller uses functioning as a residential neighbourhood just a few meters far from the metropolitan city.�6 Block areas are also very different because in Abu Dhabi the city is conceived for cars but in Taipei blocks are subdivided in smaller units that allow a higher walkability index.
F.A.R
Dwelling Density
Open Space
Coverage
Population Density
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Average Block Area
Urban Planning
Vila de Gràcia, Barcelona Catalunya
L’Eixample, Barcelona Catalunya
41.24 N / 02.10 E Organic Grid
41.24 N / 02.10 E Geometric Supergrid
In the case of Barcelona, L’Eixample and Vila de Gràcia are two drastically different fabrics in the same city. On one side, the Cerdá grid with the chamfered corners, famous in urbanism for its rationality and density. Every three blocks the width of the streets increases, allowing larger scale traffic and conforming superblocks. As an opposite, Vila de Gràcia has an organic grid that grew through time as rural areas became urban. It is based on small and irregular blocks connected by pedestrian streets. The heavy traffic streets are located in the border and the vehicles that transit inside are mainly for logistics and public transportation. These two examples in the same city demonstrate how both types of fabrics can coexist, yet they only do because each makes up for the lacks of the other. Taking this into account, the idea of the prototype is to have a supergrid that also gives the possibility of diversity of activity scales, uses and walkability.
F.A.R
Dwelling Density
Open Space
Coverage
Population Density
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Average Block Area
Islamabad Pakistan
CBD, Melbourne Australia
33.42 N / 73.02 E Geometric Grid
37.48 S / 144.57 E Geometric Grid
The examples of Islamabad and Melbourne were chosen for very different reasons. Islamabad, although very low in density and height, has an interesting relation with natural elements as it integrates green belts inside the general composition of the fabric.
F.A.R
The CBD in Melbourne also has low dwelling density but on the contrary, has an interesting mix of commerce and offices that at the same time produce drastic changes in height. Buildings start from 1 story up to 47 stories. The block dimensions (100 x 200) and their subdivision through small alleys generate small plazas in the inside of the blocks that provide changes of scale inside the same block. Last but not least, the distribution of the transportation network in this district, thorugh buses and trams allows a high connectivity from all points of the grid with the rest of the city.
Dwelling Density
Open Space
Coverage
Population Density
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Average Block Area
Urban Planning
Anatomy, Metabolism and Physiology
After an analysis of the physical parameters of the chosen cities, the next step was to compare them to make a conclusion about which conditions are fit for a self sufficient neighborhood. Although, suitable values of the parameteres were settled, the prototype was developed as a parametric model where all the variables could be modified during the process of conception. The reason for this was that the neighborhood proposed has no equal amongst the cities of the world. Many come close to some conditions that are proposed, but since many new ideas of self-sufficency have to be tested, urbanism has to be open to change.
F.A.R
Dwelling Density
Open Space
Coverage
Population Density
Average Block Area
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Prototype Composition
After the analysis of different urban fabrics, it was decided that the prototype would obey to an ortogonal supergrid. The area of 1 km by 1 km is defined by heavy traffic perimetral roads. Following the example of Melbourne, the internal grid generates rectangular blocks of 120 x 250 meters. The neighborhood is divided in quarters by two crossing roads that also define the center where the main neighborhood-scale facilites will be concentrated.
As seen in the urban examples that were analyzed, the height, density and scale of activities decreases towards the center of the hyperblock. The composition of the prototype obeys to the same rule yet these same factors also decrease towards the center of each block where public space appears. Another important element of the general layout is the appeareance of a green belt that in a bigger scale connects the whole city but in the neighborhood scale, is an opportunity of productive public space. All these rules were applied to the prototype by parametric modelling so that rules could evolve as the research did as well.
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Urban Planning
noun the branch of science concerned with the bodily structure of humans, animals, and other living organisms.
noun the chemical processes that occur within a living organism in order to maintain life.
noun the scientific study of normal function in living systems.
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Layer Metabolism
To discover what makes a city’s metabolism efficient, two cities from the anatomical analysis were chosen to be measured again under the matabolic scope. Merlbourne and Barcelona are compared to give insights about how contemporary cities operate and in which way can this behaviour be improved. These cities were not chosen randomly, instead they were the ones that provided more open data.
the possible performance of the self-sufficient city propossed in the exercise. In this sense, the higher values were given to autonomous yet networked behaviours. The hypothetical values of the prototype were overlapped to these to allow easier comparison. Although it would make sense to propose 100% self-sufficiency, many of the cycles work with inputs from nature that cannot be contained by cities (such as fresh water, sunlight, wind, some food, etc). Even so, the aim is to achieve the highest values, taking into account the systems that could be altered today to propose guidelines that can be easily adopted by other cities.
In this case, both cities are evaluated by the performance of the main cycles. The value given to each depends on 5 other parameters that determine how sustainable the cycle is. With the results from this comparison, it was possible to determine
INFORMATION
FOOD
TRANSPORTATION
MATTER
WATER
ENERGY
Melbourne Barcelona Prototype
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Urban Planning
Layer Metabolism
FOOD With the traditional conception that food is to be produced in rural areas, food self-sufficiency today can only be measured for countries. Compared with Australia and Spain, the prototype would have total accessibility and capacity to feed all its inhabitants. The products that cannot be grown due to weather conditions can be imported in small quantities. This would lower the dependency on systems foreign to the city.
WATER The main objective of the self-sufficient prototype is to have a zero waste water cycle. Thus, the fresh water withdrawal rate is lowered and the treated water is increased. Also, water management is directly related to the consumption per capita. The main objective is to reuse all treated water and also to share water consuming electrodomestics in order to lower consumption.
ENERGY If energy is produced locally by renewable means the dependecy on import is lowered to the minimum. This also allows that all the population has electricity access and is able to store energy for lower production periods. Added to that, energy consumption per capita would be lowered with the efficient urban fabric composition for easier grid management and intelligent consumption.
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MATTER To make a city sustainable in the matter cycle, the aim must be to recycle or reuse all the waste produced. This leads to the possibility of having small scale factories and production centers inside the prototype to allow citizens to fabricate their own furniture, textiles, processed food and other goods. This factories would use the materials thrown to waste and would be connected to other factories in the city to exchange. In turn, the waste produced is decreased and the processing of it is increased.
MOBILITY When private cars are removed from the system, walkability inside the prototype is increased. The trips taken by the population outside their neighborhood are done in public transportation. This means that the capacity and quality of the latter is increased, just like the connectivity index. In a larger scale, this reduces the traffic congestion of the city as well as the emissions produces by motorized vehicles.
INFORMATION Information exchange in the contemporary city is a crucial component for design. Data enables the improvement of the systems and the constant participation of the citizens in the making of the city. Landline connections are reserved for tertiary uses but broadband capacity is increased to allow all users to be connected to the city.
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Urban Planning
City Physiology
Following a comparison with a living organism, the city with an anatomical system that functions through metabolic processes will have a series of properties that allow it to survive, adapt and live. In the case of cities, these properties such as: resilience, diversity, habitability and contingency, amongst others, mainly come as result of an efficient political and economical management of resources. The measurement of the physiological properties can be approached in many ways: performance-based, system-based or empirical. Yet one thing its true: “Social systems determine human behaviour, which is also influenced by physical systems in the urban environment.�7
With this in mind, although measurent depends on both tangible (measurable) and intangible (cultural) factors, and the self-sufficient prototype is linked to no place or culture, it will be true that by affecting the urban environment the social behaviour will also be affected. This means that a city designed to be self-sufficient will produce a social system that acts accordingly, with citizens that have the power to choose and manage their own resources.
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Flows
NETWORKS
Food (tons)
Matter (tons)
Housing
Water (liters)
Energy (kW)
Tertiary
Facilities
Waste (tons)
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Transport (trips)
Public Space
NODES
Information (bytes)
Urban Planning
NOTES 1. “The Shaping of Urban Society: A History of City Forms and Functions by Janet Roebuck” Review by: Richard G. Miller in The History Teacher Vol. 9, No. 2 (Feb., 1976) , pp. 333-334 Published by: Society for History Education. http://www.jstor.org/stable/49232 2. http://www.citylab.com/design/2012/02/why-places-welive-make-us-happy/1122/ 3. Urbanism: An Archivist’s Art? in Mutations. Koolhaas, Rem et al. 4. “Water management” in Report: Cities alive - 100 issues shaping future cities. Arup University. 5. “Circular economy” in Report: Cities alive - 100 issues shaping future cities. Arup University. 6. Prototype of Urbanity on https://www.anacankar.com. 7. City Resilience Framework. 2014. ARUP & Partners. pp. 6.
References - BERTAUD, Alain. RICHARDSON, Harry. Transit and density: Atlanta, the United States and Western Europe in “Urban Sprawl in Western Europe and the USA”: http://courses. washington.edu/gmforum/Readings/Bertaud_Transit_US_Europe.pdf - DIEZ, Tomás. Distributed and open creation platforms as key enablers for smarter cities in “Journal of peer production”: http://peerproduction.net/issues/issue-5-shared-machineshops/editorial-section/distributed-and-open-creation-platforms-as-key-enablers-for-smarter-cities/ - GEHL, Jan. - JACOBS, Jane. “Life and Death of Great American Cities” - KENNEDY, Christopher et al. Sustainable urban systems: an integrated approach in Journal of Industrial Ecology. Vol. 16. No. 6. Yale University Press. - KOOLHAAS, Rem. Whatever happened to urbanism? in S, M, L, XL - KOOLHAAS, Rem et al. Urbanism: An Archivist’s Art? in “Mutations” - KROGH JENSEN, Marianne. Space unfolded - space as movement, action and creation in “Mind your behaviour” by 3XN. pp. 80 - LAUX, Gunther. Transformation - City Morphing in “Media and urban space: understanding, investigating and approaching mediacity” ed. ECKARDT, Frank. pp. - LSE CITIES. https://lsecities.net - MILLER, Richard. Review:The Shaping of Urban Society: A History of City Forms and Functions by Janet Roebuck. In “The History Teacher” Vol. 9, No. 2 (Feb., 1976), pp. 333-334: http://www.jstor.org/stable/49232 - MONTGOMERY, Charles. The Happy City. - PERRELLA, Stephen. Hipersurfaces. - SENNET, Richard. The Open City in “Urban Age” (Nov. 2006) - VON ROSENBLADT, Bernhard. The outdoor activity system in an urban environment. In pp. 336 - 3XN. Human behaviour in “Mind your behaviour” by 3XN. pp. 57
IMAGE CREDITS 1. City as an egg - Cedric Price / Evolution of cities - Manuel Gausa 2. Network types - Paul Baran
- Report: Climate action in megacities 3.0. C40 et al. - Report: Greenest City: 2020 action plan. City of Vancouver. - Report: European common indicators. Ambiente Italia Research Center. - Report: City Resilience Framework. 2014. ARUP & Partners. - Report: Barcelona Datasheet 2012. Ajutament de Barcelona. - Report: Urban measurement 2014. ARUP & Partners. - Report: La sociedad de la información en España en 2013. Fundación Telefónica. - Report: Toolkit for Resilient Cities. Arup, RA and Siemens. - Report: Cities and energy - urban morphology and heat energy demand. LSE Cities. Report: Cities alive - 100 issues shaping future cities. Arup University.
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