urban-logic.com

Reburbia: The voting is open

The Reburbia competition, sponsored by Inhabitat and Dwell, is now open for voting on the top 20 finalists. The design competition is geared towards re-envisioning the suburbs. The current housing crisis has torn through many suburban communities and ripped them up as homes have been foreclosed and abandoned.

Suburbia will no longer be able to continue as it has, so what is the future for these sprawling communities? Can they be re-imagined into something far less generic and bland? Can the weaknesses in these areas be turned around to produce assets that move more towards sustainable, walkable communities? Or can these empty buildings be re-purposed? Here’s a few highlights from the competition…

Some of the entries focused on what to do with all these big boxes littering the ‘burbs. In “Big Box Agriculture: A Productive Suburb“, the idea is that the large retail stores that go out of business can be turned into productive farms with greenhouse and restaurants inside and larger agriculture taking over the parking lot. These farms in turn would grow food for local markets and restaurants and residents could prepare their freshly picked produce on the spot in the big box restaurants.

Another finalist looks at these big boxes as a way to produce fuel in rather simple and realistic way, called “Big Box Stores Transformed Into Biofuel Generators.” This entry is dedicated to fueling the Biofuel movement which needs cheap, flat, modular space with connections to the nations freeways to produce algae-based fuel on the scale required to push the movement to the next level and move beyond traditional oil.

Another interesting finalist, titled “Pure: Transforming Swimming Pools Into Water Treatment Plants” looks at what to do with all those backyard pools in the warmer areas. Pure would use six successive purification stages to clean the areas wastewater in the same vein as constructed wetlands, to achieve clean water that could then be used once again by the community. Small-scale food production could also be a product of this solution.

Or perhaps go even larger scale like in “Frog’s Dream: McMansion’s Turned Into Biofilter Water Treatment Plants.” The predictions are that the mansions of suburbia will become adadoned as more people seek a shrink in their household size and overall change in lifestyle. Frog’s Dream proposes to “transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of cities, into eco-water treatment machines, commercially known as Living Machines, in which a micro-ecosystem of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify the water. A micro-wetland ecosystem will be formed around these mansions to sustain larger wetland animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.”

Another finalist has come up with a nice solution called “Regenerative Suburban Median” that seems doable now in many areas and that’s to take those ugly too-wide streets and narrow them down for a friendlier feel, allow for safer pedestrian activity and to introduce a productive median. This would also help to activate the space, give people a reason to get out of their houses and meet each other and to engage in the community.

Narrowing down the street and injecting some friendliness into these neighborhoods isn’t the only goal here, the medians would also become a closed loop system for water, agriculture and human waste. From the website: “The localized water treatment system, when tied into existing infrastructure, slowly curbs the neighborhood demand for distant fresh water supplies and the energy required for its transport and treatment. Depending on local conditions the design of a regenerative median could manipulate other elements ultimately inserting open space, residential units, mass transportation, pedestrian circulation, park land, or native habitat.”

But of course, we all know that the best of them all is definitely to “Let Them Burn“. Although you can’t vote for it but you can check it out in the Notable Entries. But if that ain’t a party then I don’t know what is. I think I hear some Bloodhound Gang playing in the background…

Check out all the finialists at Reburbia