ENERGY-( R ) EVOLUTION

As more than half of the world’s population is expected to continue to livein cities, exponential urban development and population growth along withinfrastructural increase are considered as parallel concerns and topics of discussion.The purpose of these design speculations is to offer potential designapplications for architects and urban planners into dynamic investigations,integrating a layered approach of amalgamating architecture / landscape /infrastructure within future scenarios of “edge-based” urban environments(Hong Kong, Bangladesh, Shanghai, Houston, Texas, and Orlando, Florida).The topic of discussion, which has been in the past fifty years, and will continueto be under relentless scrutiny given the challenges of ecological changes,sustainable anxiety, and those aspects of urban development deal with designprocesses that consider the urban fabric and taking into account to the scalabilityof agricultural and ecological research, which has been and will continueto be a necessary requirement for future city planning.To better understand the repercussions within the current state of the world,case-studies developed in past studios were developed using several internationalmajor ‘hit’ zones: Orlando, Florida and Houston, Texas (two US citiesthat are predicted to be 60 meters under water within the next 100 years),and Bangladesh, Shanghai, China, and Hong Kong (three Asian edge citiesthat are historically influenced through Western persuasion, and are consistentlysuffering from overpopulation). These case-studies of locations wereused to develop topological research proposals of inquiry of alternative energysolutions that anchor itself within the system of developmental research usingnon-solar and non-wind driven sustainable energy solutions.The case-studies took into specific environmental conditions into considerationto explore the various levels and aspects that pertained to designapproaches that have certain ecological effects and techniques of self-sustainablesystems. Whereby each researched location had specific contextualapproaches that were based on a manifold of environmental conditions definingthe ecological designs. Topics of design used both analogue and digitaltools to further Urban Strategies as related to each individual city. Much ofthe research originated through finding innovative forms of connections andquest for paradigms within digital designs applied to sustainable urban cities.The dominant theme within the speculative and developmental proposalsquestioned the edge condition of urban coastal developments, and activelyponders the role of architects, designers, and urban planners, edge interventionand construction along coastlines and waterfronts. Within the sociodevelopmentalaspects, these projects are in search of a new set of relationshipsbetween democracy, individualism, sustainability, and capitalism for‘edge’ conditions and their typological repercussions. Whether the ecological,economical and equity are balanced within a triangular relationship betweenurban development and our sustainable future cities, many of the proposalssystematically questioned the authenticity of current cities, and whether theregard of sprawl and dynamic urban growth has affected the developmentalbehavior of the human understanding of places and non-places.

Volume Editors
Martha Thorne & Xavier Costa

ISBN
978-0-935502-83-1