The BIG U transforms the landscape of lower Manhattan to protect against future climate vulnerabilities exposed by Hurricane Sandy. Image by BIGBjarke Ingels Group.
The Urban World O
n paper, Xiongan New Area looks green. Islands of trees surrounded by meandering riverways that scallop neatly gridded streets. There are no cars in sight. China’s model city looks somehow both orderly and organic. And it doesn’t yet exist. The cities of the future are being built today. Some, like Xiongan New Area, are colossal planned metropolises with high-speed rail and designed to ease congestion in nearby megacities. The cities of the future are also the ones people live in today that are implementing policies and public works projects to gradually transform the urban landscape. Like New York City’s plans to safeguard lower Manhattan from the next Superstorm Sandy with a 10-mile greenbelt ribbon that USU alumna Jamie Maslyn Larson’s firm designed. But cities are ever-changing organisms. Cities, by definition, require people. And people change. Locks change. Earthquakes level cities. Floods sink them. Epidemics shape cities, too.
Aggies who are working today to rethink the cities of tomorrow. By Kristen Munson
They tend to disproportionately gut the poor and blow open the cracks in society. In 1832, during the height of a cholera epidemic, wealthy New Yorkers fled the city in stagecoaches for the countryside. Upwards of 3,500 people, many poor immigrants, perished from a disease they didn’t yet understand. Two centuries later, COVID-19 revealed similar disparities. While bodies piled up in refrigerated tractor trailers, headlines like “How will cities survive the coronavirus?” forecasted the end of urbanity. History will likely prove otherwise. Seventeen years after the 1832 cholera epidemic occurred, New York’s population had doubled. The United Nations projects that 70 percent of people will live in cities by 2050, with the largest clusters being in Asia and Africa. COVID-19 is unlikely to be the force to upend that. But it may shape how cities evolve. FALL 2020 I UTAHSTATE
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