Back in July we alerted TM readers to Dwell Magazine’s ReBurbia competition. Well, the submissions are in, and unsurprisingly, the 20 finalists are filled with super creative, but fantastical, totally outrageous proposals.
We know suburbia needs retrofitting. The 20th century was about building the damn thing, but seeing the results, we have to use the 21st century to correct all of the ills proffered by such an untenable way of organizing the built environment. Indeed, retrofitting suburbia is likely to be the biggest collective project for 21st century urban planners.
With that in mind, please considering visiting the Reburbia finalist site and voting for the Sprawl Repair Kit, designed by Galina Tahchieva and others at DPZ. Simply click on the little red house in the upper right hand corner of the screen. Voting closes tomorrow night.
Your vote is important, as it will send the message to all Dwell readers and beyond that as fun as flying airships and treehouses are, we need practical and realistic solutions for a very serious 21st century problem. As a side note, the techniques outlined in the preferred proposal above encompass those very same principles embodied by Miami 21.
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DPZ’s submission is by far the most pragmatic of the entries. They provide a real solution for existing buildings. Block by block density and connectivity are created.
By the way…the DPZ submission won the contest, as voted by the public. However, the Dwell editors also gave themselves the wiggle room to choose the “real” winner. We’ll see who that winds up being. I am guessing not DPZ. I hope I am wrong. It was the only pragmatic solution.
“PEOPLE’S CHOICE AWARD
Finally, the People’s Choice Award entry, which was selected through an online voting process that allowed the general public to elect their favorite entry from a list of twenty finalists, was the Urban Sprawl Repair Kit: Repairing the Urban Fabric, submitted by Galina Tahchieva. With a staggering 2,348 votes, the design delineated five building typologies characteristic of suburbia, and corresponding formulas for recreating them in order to promote environmental responsibility and community building. There were a total of 188 comments on Ms. Galina’s proposal, of which the vast majority echoed the thoughts of Walter Chatham who said, “This is an incredibly thoughtful and practical solution to poor urban design, butit also suggests how the many, many “tired” relics of the twentieth century can find intelligent and useful life well into the twenty-first century. This is the greenest idea of all.””