Future Visions and Scenarios | Design Charrette

Urban - Car-Free Environment

While the idea of a car free city may seem like an unlikely reality, there are in fact cities that have already achieved success – eliminating large amounts of congestion from within the city centers (See http://www.carfree.com/carfree_places_old.html).

Using London as a case study (Source: http://www.vtpi.org/london.pdf), our group assembled and looked at how implementing London’s concept of a congestion fee might affect Brisbane. We decided to look at the problems it may cause within the cities layout, and how Brisbane might adapt if there was a congestion fee system within the Brisbane CBD. 

Some of the problems we encountered included:

• How much would you charge in order to stop cars entering the city?
• Go extremely high to stop car traffic altogether? or;
• High enough to still allow traffic for personal emergency situations (late for work/meeting etc)?
• How do we define the limits of this transition between traffic friendly and unfriendly zones? (In accordance to the congestion fee system)
• Is it just the Brisbane CBD that will incur the congestion charge?
• Do we need to cover surrounding districts?
• What happens to the congestion? Where does it go?
• Would people just park their cars on the outside of the transition zones?
• Will these suburbs be equipped to handle the increase in traffic?

We decided to look at how Brisbane’s city layout might change if this system were to be implemented:

Current City Model

Zone 1: Brisbane Central Business District

Zone 2: Culture Hubs

Zone 3: Suburbs

Future City Model

Zone 1: Culture hub

Zone 2: Brisbane Central Business District

Zone 3: Culture Hub

Zone 4: Suburbs

Reasoning

With the implementation of a congestion fee, many retail businesses will relocate to the outskirts of the central city limits (Zone 2; where the fee no longer applies). This will ultimately form a ring of commercial structures. Land and buildings once used for commercial purposes (Zone 1) within the inner city districts will be reclaimed and used for culture hubs (educational facilities, clubs, museums etc). The outer ring (Zone 3) would need to be re-developed in order to handle the relocated traffic and congestion; ultimately providing another culture/retail district surrounding the main center of commerce.

Suburban - Sustainable Retail Experiences

While we did consider what a physical retail experience would feel like in the future (analysing retail approaches from companies like Apple), we chose to approach it slightly differently. Assuming all shopping was to be done online, we looked at the current societal model, focusing on elements that would need to change in accordance to mass online shopping and the delivery methods that would then result. Some of these elements include:

• Postage services would need to change drastically in order to keep up with the enormous increase in item deliveries;
• We would develop a global shipping and delivery service as a result of this change;
• Enormous warehouses would be required to stock the incoming purchases before being distributed to the appropriate buyers;
• Items would go directly from production to shipping to the online buyerThis would result in less production waste and packaging as items would be created based on the demand for that item.
• Packaging would no longer be required for the purpose of aesthetic advertising
• Resources would only be exhausted based on the current demands; resulting in lower production rates and less landfill
• Manufacturing companies would globalise – building manufacturing facilities in all major countries and continents;
• Postage services would need to become considerably faster when purchasing from outside of the country/state;
• Postage services would need to adopt green initiatives in order to offset the large increase in global emissions due to the increase in service requirements;
• Postage/delivery services would need to adapt working hours to suit everyone (9am-5pm would not suffice) – alternatively, people would need to have PO boxes for deliveries.

Regional - Self-sufficient Community

Our concept for a regional self-sufficient community stems from the idea of interconnected city hubs. Due to the lack of development in rural areas, this presents architectural opportunities to create an identity for the surrounding area. By developing self-sufficient interconnected city-developments we can utilise these regional/rural areas to create a starting source for future living and design principals.

Each green high-density development becomes a self-driven community that relies on its adjacent communities for resource sharing and distribution. The image below summarises our intents at a basic level:

NOTE: Images are from a previous assignment 

Virtual - Strategies for all Regions

Our approach to a virtual strategy was an extension from an assignment that I participated in last semester: VOICE

 

For this purpose of this activity however, there would be no physical installation. The idea surrounded the presence of an invisible social network which encompassed each relevant location. This would encourage like-minded people to inhabit different parts of the city/are depending on their social preference. It would act as a virtual meet-and-greet system; while offering areas within the city to speak your mind and address current societal issues.