San Francisco, United States of America

Rising Tides. San Francisco

To think about new ideas about human settlements is to think about new forms of growth and/or recession, based on biocompatibility and eco-sustainability. Nowadays, new form of urbanism must be thought against sprawl and current building technologies, no more endurable, and towards high density urban dots which can preserve the rest of the land, in term of natural and historical heritages. The possibilities of such a kind of city must be referred to the potentialities of extreme technologies: the alternative is a conscious and environment-friendly return to pre-capitalistic economies. The absolute density theory proclaims the individuation of urban points of maximum density, spaced out by no-density growth preserved territories. Everyplace will be linked by new and bio-compatible transport modalities not bound to the land, based on the discovery of new forms of renewable energy. The predominance of cars and infrastructures will end and new infra-free urban configurations, based on the figure of the constellation will overcome the present net-settlements. Let’s consider now the specific case of San Francisco. In case of dramatic sea level rising, we propose to concentrate the entire population of the present city in an architectural-urban object, placed on a floating plate, which will give room to a tropical forest in an degraded Mediterranean climate context. Such ecosystem on a 6000 m diameter (113 km²) should produce 227000 tC/yr live biomass per year and stock carbon at about a 8000 tC/yr range (0.63 tC/ha/yr). Biomass produced should provide human settlements wood, medical plant facilities, vegetal and animal food resources and recreation areas in addition to carbon regulation. The existing city will be protected from flooding by a growing self-bearing dome, which will be completed in case of extreme sea level rise. In that case, the historical city will develop in a submarine historical theme park, linked to the new city through an umbilical infrastructure. The new architectural-urban object will allocate 2 million citizens in 400 million cubic meters: the density (calculated on the surface of the plate) will be 25.000 citizens/square Km, just the average between Montecarlo’s density (23.000) and Manhattan Island’s one (27.000). The shape of the architectural-urban object is obtained from absolute figures and specific traces, according to the theory of the operational design. The starting mass is egg-shaped, in which an inner egg is carved and some parts of the remaining volume are cut, following formal relations accorded to the historical districts of San Francisco and to the mutual positions of the 13 major cities in the United States of America, according to the list by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. Assuming such an high level rise, most of the land will be under the sea, so we propose other architectural-urban objects, in order to give home to the entire regional population. We locate the positions of the 12 new architectural-urban objects following the mutual relationships between the 13 major cities in U.S.A., having as starting point the city of San Francisco. At a national scale, we repeat the proposal for those 13 major urban areas, constituting a constellation for each area, to save the U.S.A. population and to preserve the 13 most important historical urban heritage through 13 domes. Repeating the operational design method for each architectural-urban object, in each constellations, we will always have different results, even if strongly connected together by the relation between the cities and the historical urban districts. The resulting national structure will be a great constellation at a continental scale: the image of a new country which will be named U.C.A. – United Cities of America.

Europaconcorsi Beta

Rising Tides. San Francisco