URB_711 Elements of Urban Design- Core Studio: ‘The Future Great City of the World’

“St. Louis alone would be an all-sufficient theme; for who can doubt that this prosperous metropolis is destined to be one of the mighty centers of our mighty Republic?”

–Charles Sumner from L.U. Reavis, “St. Louis: The Future Great City of the World” (1871)

 

“Detroit is closer to its future than we imagine.”

–Detroit Future City, 2012

 

This interdisciplinary, systems-based urban design studio emphasizes the interconnectivity of macro to micro level systems—megaregion, city, district, neighborhood, block, and lot—and their spatial, social, and environmental design opportunities. Hybridizing strategies from landscape architecture, architecture, and urban design, students utilize the tenets of infrastructural urbanism to develop next generation, integrated design solutions that explore sustainable, innovative, and creative proposals for revitalizing cities of the former rust belt.

 

Unlike trendy coastal cities with skyrocketing property costs, peak traffic, and fierce competition for space, renegade cities with a DIY culture and adventurous leadership are experimenting with new forms of planning, design, and infrastructure; these cities are petri dishes for demonstration projects that can be tested, iterated, and exported to other contexts. Detroit is our petri dish; St. Louis is our target context; design proposals for catalytic new infrastructural moments of intensity are our opportunities to project the city’s next future.

 

Mapping comparative aspects of St. Louis and Detroit, students focused on the interrelationships between urban systems (water, waste, energy, food, mobility, information, power, ecology) and the characteristics that connect and contrast the two cities. By charting the infrastructural milestones that define these places, physically and otherwise, students sought projective opportunities for transformation or creation. What are these cities getting right and why? Where are the biggest needs and opportunities? Empirical observations from site visits supplemented electronic, quantitative research. In addition, students analyzed case studies as models of infrastructural intervention.

 

Students then applied lessons learned from their initial analysis, assessment of cases, and city tours to sites of intervention in St. Louis. Final projects incorporated a micro/macro intervention instigated from points of intensity where multiple infrastructural systems intersect, demonstrating relevance to both the broad network and the local node and supporting the exploration of contrasting or comparative conditions between Detroit and St. Louis.

 

Considerations included imaging the infrastructural optimism of these two cities and their prospective conditions: What future city can we create that sets a framework for the most positive environmental, social, and economic results for all inhabitants? The ability to operationalize the city, to leverage large-scale infrastructural investment for greater social and environmental gain, is what categorizes a design strategy as infrastructural urbanism; its ability to project a better future is its infrastructural opportunism.

 

> Ian Dickenson, Director at Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects, led the Detroit field visit and served as a valued practitioner-consultant to the studio throughout the semester.