THE SUDBURY SUPERSTRUCTURE
Greater Sudbury is one of the most infamous mining towns in all of Canada. Rich with Nickel deposits, this city's purpose grew more important throughout the twentieth century as the demand for metal production increased. Unfortunately, Nickel extraction is one of the most environmentally damaging processes in the entire mining industry.
For Sudbury, the city's global reputation would find itself in the crossroads come towards the latter half of the century as the mining industry wreaked havoc on the land. Over seven thousand lakes would become polluted, millions of trees cut down, and poor air quality paying homage to higher cancer rates in the region; Sudbury was experiencing a crisis.
In the 1970s, Sudbury had an awaking of just how bad the damage was when confronting these harsh facts. Fast forward forty years later, a city that had once seen cataclysmic environmental damage at its doorstep has drastically reversed its course. With rich experiences on how to restore the environment, Sudbury is looking to become the forefront example on how to combat climate change.
With the 2050 initiative, the city is engaging in a proactive future that goes even further into healing the planet while maintaining healthy residual growth of the urban fabric. At its current state, Sudbury is still not functioning as it should be. The urban core feels disconnected with itself. Residents do not connect with the whole community as many rail lines separate one another. Downtown Greater Sudbury lays dormant as its occupancy maintains nothing more than office space. A lack of public parks & plazas also reduces the city's liveliness & health. This troubling reality of the urban fabric is nothing isolated as cities across the globe are often confronting these same issues; but it is resolvable.
For Sudbury, the need to remove the rail lines in order to liberate the core is a necessary change. There's over twenty hectares of land in the center of the city's urban center that acts as a barrier. Removing this opens opportunity for up to seventy hectares of development. A grid-oriented bustling new downtown with tall buildings could be born from the former rail yard.
But there's a major problem: high-rises are not efficient. Elevators alone require a substantial amount of energy to operate. Renewable resources are also restricted, as high-rise timber structures are still in their infancy. There's also a density issue. As space becomes less abundant, buildings must make a sacrifice by building higher, which in turn reduces sunlight from penetrating the ground level & heightens energy costs. Furthermore, allocation of street traffic on the grid reduces opportunity for larger open spaces to occur. As it seems, the current method of designing a typical urban intervention is incredibly inefficient in combatting climate change.
What if we reversed how we typically design cities? What if we inversed the grid, where the streets become the structure & the blocks become the void? In this intervention, you can achieve the same floor area without having to build tall. Without the need of high-rises, energy costs are cut drastically as renewable materials and functions are easily imported into the design. Furthermore, more than double the amount of open space is activated in the blocks that would normally house the built environment. The inverse of the grid not only solves all the problems that a traditional intervention would bring with it, but it accomplishes what needs to be done in order to make our cities combat climate change head-on. This is the core principle behind the Sudbury Superstructure.
The Sudbury Superstructure aims to become a model for cities across the globe to follow. Just as it has become a humbling example of healing diminished ecosystems in the past, Sudbury can continue its legacy by leading the forefront of combatting climate change.
The Sudbury Superstructure re-imagines how we perceive cities. Rather than trying to make prehistoric urban design theories work, we must propose new ideas that have promise to deliver results. Developing an urban intervention strategy such as this can easily answer many of the profound problems society faces today. The Sudbury Superstructure aims to redefine the flexibility of a space within the means of the grid, all while improving conditions for the future development of cities.
(Competitor's text)
5 scanned / 5 viewable
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
- Presentation Panel
