ALIMENTARY URBANISM
From extraction to Cultivation
The City of Sudbury has the opportunity to become a leader in urban transformation by acknowledging and leaving behind its history characterized by extraction, environmental destruction, and dispossession and instead to look toward a future characterized by cultivation, nourishment, and support.
Sudbury is in a landscape of incredible beauty and inhabited by a resourceful population who value their independence and self-sufficiency. But Sudbury has its share of challenges, many with urban implications: an aging population; the effects of opioid addiction; a history of local sovereignty denied; infrastructure systems in need of upgrading; all on top of a history of environmental destruction driven by the mining industry. Urban design often assumes economic growth as its driver and as its yardstick. Such growth is often built on the same extraction-based industries that are responsible for some of these problems. Increasingly, there is a growing awareness of not just the limits of this approach but of the harm that it causes through the creation of structural inequities that become self-reinforcing. In other words, as the environment's resources are depleted, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Alimentary Urbanism begins with a simple but fundamental question: What would a city be like if its infrastructure was directed toward nourishing and supporting its population? We borrow the term from the text "Beyond Wiindigo Infrastructure" by Winona LaDuke and Deborah Cowen in which they outline a path to a "regenerative economy" through a reframing of infrastructure not as tool of extraction and propagation of a fossil fuel economy (e.g. oil pipelines) but rather as transformative and focused on "people and kin before profits."
To translate these ideas into an urban design framework,this project envisions a thriving Sudbury by transforming its sites of extractive mining operations into a suite of regenerative economic practices: food cultivation; energy production; reforestation and timber production; as well as new forms of education, healthcare, outreach, and recreation. The Downtown Core becomes a new hub for these activities and a model for a regenerative economy. The abundant reforested mines support innovative and widespread use of cross-laminated timber (CLT) and transforms the look and feel of Downtown. Two "Commons Corridors" extend from the railyard to Elm Street and become sites of new housing, educational, and community institutions while the Rainbow Centre is made into a vibrant public market. These economic drivers repurpose and expand the area's robust rail network to redistribute new assets throughout Sudbury's diverse neighborhoods. A series of new rail spurs sponsor community infrastructure nodes that provide essential services as well as cyclical recreational, social, and enrichment opportunities in the form of a fleet of mobile programs.
Alimentary Urbanism is a strategic framework that imagines a middle-out approach to urban design and governance. Not a top-down model of state redevelopment mandate (which has a bad history in Sudbury), nor a "bottom-up" approach that depends either on market forces or individual ingenuity, this approach builds new cooperative community organizations that support incremental, deliberate and collective self-determination.
(Competitor's text)
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