Urban sprawl

Summary

Urban sprawl (also known as suburban sprawl or urban encroachment) is defined as "the spreading of urban developments (such as houses and shopping centers) on undeveloped land near a city". Urban sprawl has been described as the unrestricted growth in many urban areas of housing, commercial development, and roads over large expanses of land, with little concern for urban planning. In addition to describing a special form of urbanization, the term also relates to the social and environmental consequences associated with this development. Medieval suburbs suffered from the loss of protection of city walls, before the advent of industrial warfare. Modern disadvantages and costs include increased travel time, transport costs, pollution, and destruction of the countryside. The cost of building urban infrastructure for new developments is hardly ever recouped through property taxes, amounting to a subsidy for the developers and new residents at the expense of existing property taxpayers. In

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urban_sprawl

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Working with extreme urban density: Hong Kong. A prototype of mixed-use building in Hong Kong

Wing-Chung Cheung, Joana Varela

Urban sprawl, a solution to house fast-growing metropolitan populations, dilutes the substance of cities and generates extensive uniformly built fabrics lacking structural poles of attraction. Hong Kong is one of the seldom exceptions of this general tendency. Constrained by its geographic conditions and its historical background, the city has remained compact and reached elevated levels of density. This extreme concentration of population and its impact upon urban form constitute an excellent laboratory to experiment new forms of density. Furthermore, Hong Kong becomes even more relevant as it is a development model for its emerging Chinese neighbours. Our intention is to maintain and enhance density in the urbanized areas and to improve the living environment in the denser cores of the city. The main challenges are to provide more public spaces and to ensure equal light and spatial qualities for everyone. To achieve this objective, the project must find an architectural solution that proposes a new interpretation of the standard Hong Kong tower. Firstly, we would like to avoid the urban barrier created by the common podium typology, by making the latter more permeable and public. Secondly, the density of Hong Kong encourages the existence of a mixed-use building, combining various functions and allowing for the cohabitation of public and private programs. Consequently the various programs can be located optimally in the building according to factors such as light, view, orientation and connection.

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Urban renewal and sustainability

Maria Gracia Riera Perez

Many studies have shown that urban sprawl, which typifies most European cities, leads to: waste of land, increased energy demand, environmental impacts and high infrastructure costs. It is therefore necessary to renew the existing urban fabric to provide a good quality environment for a growing population, enable efficient management of economic resources, energy and environment. The aim of the project is to develop a decision support tool at the neighborhood scale, integrating sustainability into the dynamics of urban renewal projects through a multi-criteria assessment method including socio-cultural, economic and environmental aspects. This research project aims to promote a transparent, conscious and responsible decision-making, but also to contribute to the creative process of the future vision through a reliable and structured source of information on the neighborhood and its context.

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The Big Building

Marta Meira Brandão

Large hybrid objects integrating multiple functions and whose scale, over 100'000 m2, is halfway between the fragment of a city and that of a large-scale building: these are the key features of the complex projects that are triggering new debates on the subject of Design Complexity, usually referred to as Big Buildings. Recurrently bearing the predominance of housing, the paradigms of these mixed architectural forms - « cities within cities » developed either horizontally or vertically - may recall Le Corbusier's Unités d'Habitation, or even the American Hybrids, due to the multiple simultaneous conditions they succeed to accommodate within their generic envelopes. In Europe, either as a consequence of the urban densification and the resulting need for restraining the urban sprawl, or driven by political and economical dynamics of speculation and globalization, we are assisting to the echoed emergence of projects of this kind, often located nearby mobility interfaces or in old industrial areas in process of regeneration, normally with privileged connections to the city centres. The development of such projects is hypothetically becoming a trigger for the creation of new ways of producing collective housing, integrated within a more complex system of activities, bearing new strategies of articulation between housing and other programs, new models of public space, new typological experiments on the dwellings or new ways of invigorating social mix. Our intention is to investigate how effective is, then, the planning of collective housing within the massiveness of the Big Building and how can the design of housing inside this specific milieu generate new potentials and new knowledge in the architectural domain of Housing.

EPFL2017