Sudbury 2050: Compa - city
Up until the mid-l970's, Downtown Sudbury was a lively, active and vibrant space. Subsequent renovations based on the myth of the "car society" and the uncomfortable presence of the railway, emptied the center of its essence as the heart of the urban conglomerate, leaving a space with few inhabitants, discontinuous, fragmented and disconnected from the rest of the urban territory.
To build a Vision, we have looked at its history as an element of inspiration, and thus recover this space to build an open, porous and democratic city.
To do so, we focused on some fundamental questions: How to attract people back to the center? What would happen if we freed this space from cars and gave priority to the pedestrian? What would happen if we used the engineering of mines and their ability to excavate, to create tunnels and level land, in order to dismantle the railway? Is it possible to create a new agora for the city? How can we generate a diversity of activities that attract a plural and multicultural population? And finally, what would happen if we densified to generate a compact and active city?
To answer these questions, our proposal is based on three fundamental actions:
First, bury part of the railroad and dismantle it in order to generate space to build a new green heart that gives place for a new agora and meeting space for the city.
Second, freeing the center of the vehicles to give priority to the pedestrian, generating new relationships of proximity and exchange for the inhabitants of Sudbury and for all those seeking for a new place to live.
Third, get rid of all the parking spaces in the center and fill these spaces with new building typologies used for housing and commerce. This will create a compact, dense city of exchanges that will attract new residents, whether they are students, young professionals, families or the elderly who wish to live in this new center. Furthermore, it will complement the new green heart by generating new housing and mixed-use areas along the old railroad that will attract new inhabitants to the city.
To complement these actions and generate a vibrant city, we chose to reinterpret the ongoing projects for the center, such as, The Junction and Place des Arts. On the other hand we relocated the Arena including it in the green heart and expanded the University Campus, including spaces for Design and Law Faculties, as well as a new public library.
To guarantee a free space for pedestrians, we generate a series of super-blocks that guarantee a center built from the idea of proximity of activities and social exchange, by displacing private vehicular transport towards a loop outside the center.
Also a series of interchange parking lots is offered for people to transfer from their vehicle to walk or ride a bicycle; and finally, we designed a green public transport system based on electric buses that allows you to travel and connect Greater Sudbury with the inner areas of the center.
The connection of the center with its surrounding areas is guaranteed by a pedestrian and cycling path system that connects with the residential areas located in its surroundings, as well as the green reserves, the universities and parks of the urban context, the science museum and Lake Ramsey.
At a greater scale, we propose the construction of five hundred thousand square meters of parks and public space, housing for more than ten thousand inhabitants and more than two hundred thousand square meters of other functions, leading to a city rich in activities, people, culture, economic and social exchanges.
In terms of architecture, we propose a system of green roofs capable of collecting water and reusing it for different purposes, converting the parking lots on the roof of the shopping center into a park with greenhouses for community crops and recreation areas during the winter.
Greenhouses will also be distributed at level zero of the project, generating a system of smaller scale spaces that will behave as meeting places and social exchange and collective labor for the benefit of all the inhabitants of the place.
The general urban design is based on the idea of continuity between the pre-existing urban fabric of the Center in the east-west and northsouth direction, to guarantee an isotropic and porous continuity between the existing center and its extension in the areas of the railway.
The orientation of the urban fabric, in the east-west and north-south direction, also allows optimal solar exposure of the buildings, allowing a reduction in the energy consumption of the project as a whole.
The general pedestrian operation of the project is reinforced by the presence of commercial activities and services on the ground levels that guarantee a continuous interior-exterior interchange between the streets and the architecture of the new center.
The overall goal of the project is not just to create a new look and design for downtown Sudbury, but to generate a new social space for economic, political and cultural exchanges with a strong multicultural and democratic component, which can relaunch the existing space towards the future and generate an innovative, open and democratic meeting place for all the inhabitants of Sudbury.
(Competitor's text)
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