Studio HC

Musings

One small voice.

Posts tagged infrastructure
Feeding the City
Feeding the City

It is anticipated that global populations living in urban areas is going to “increase by 84 per cent by 2050, from 3.4 billion in 2009 to 6.3 billion in 2050.” (United Nations, 2009). Indeed, since 2009, the population living in urban areas had surpassed the number living in rural areas. There is therefore the inevitable question of how these mega-cities of the future can sustainably feed these populations. In this article, I have decided to investigate how different designers and architectural practices have attempted to resolve this issue at a variety of household, communal and urban scales.

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SustainabilityHugo Chanarchitecture, sustainability, design, urban farming, urbanism, infrastructure
Solar Roadways
Solar Roadways

Originally envisioned by Le Corbusier as the solution to equality, modernity and urbanism, the radial city provided the individual with autonomy, via the automobile (Merin, 2013). The vision became misinterpreted as the independent home, the separation between the urban commercial heart and a radial suburban household and led to the disaster we now recognise as urban sprawl. One of the precipitates of this urban sprawl is what we now call the Urban Heat Island effect (UHI). Characterised as the result of our built environment absorbing heat during the day and dissipating it overnight, the Urban Heat Island has generated uncomfortable inner city environments as well as contributing to increased energy consumption for heating and cooling (USEPA, 2013).  

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SustainabilityHugo Chanarchitecture, design, sustainability, solar energy, infrastructure, urbanism
Sense and Sensibility // Public Transport Infrastructure
Sense and Sensibility // Public Transport Infrastructure

It is a truth, universally acknowledged that anyone who lives in Sydney, inevitably criticises the failure of its public transport. Only in 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald reported that major auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers had identified Sydney as “forth worst major city in the world for transport and infrastructure” (Munro, 2012). The report, known as Cities of Opportunity did however, reprieve the city by naming it the most sustainable (PricewaterhouseCoopers, 2012) and how this can be the case when Sydney also has some of the worst performing buildings and urban sprawl is beyond me. Nonetheless for me, the report’s findings begged an investigation of urban sustainability and its relationship to transport infrastructure. 

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SustainabilityHugo Chanarchitecture, design, sustainability, infrastructure, sydney, hongkong, traffic, transport