Orimattila, Finland

SYMBIOSIS

Innovative town for 20000 people

Mariabruna Fabrizi, Microcities, Fosco Lucarelli

Linear parks. Linear parks cross each district of the town and provide space for leasure, sport and meeting, while working as light infrastractures.

The competition asked a plan for a self sufficient town, at first producing an abstract scheme and then applying it to the Henna area in Finland.

Double perception. Each neighborhood opens on the natural environment, while hosting inside a dense urban character.

A town is a dissipative system that needs to exchange with the outside natural world to get to a level of dynamic balance. To become a self sufficient entity, where the waste is absorbed and the energy and materials are constantly produced and renewed, a continuous exchange with the system of nature must be included in the planning.

The residential area close to the railway station. Medium density dwellings with individual access, mixed with retail stores and working spaces.

From these premises, the starting point for the project is to consider the future town as an environment which does not oppose itself to the natural context.

The boulevards. Rich and vibrant urban spaces develop along and around these paths. Squares, main buildings and commercial areas open on them.

The challenge is to get a dense and vibrant urban space, without interrupting the existing natural conditions, but including them in a continuous exchange with the built environment. To get to this goal, nature and town have to grow together in a strong relationship as two interconnected ecosystem.

Symbiosis. Or how to become self sufficient.

A town as a network

Shape of the nodes. Form follows energy and needs.

Instead of thinking on a town of 20000 inhabitants made up of a centre that slowly flows until the margins and superposes itself to the existing areas, we considered more nodes closely interconnected among them.

Energy cycle. From waste to production.

This first step allows to avoid a situation where we have only one intense city centre and the rest of the town works as an orbit, turning around in a relationship city/suburban areas.

Layers of eco efficiency.

Here, each node is part of a network that constitutes the whole town and the way the single nodes are connected one another lets nature flow throw the system, making a balanced void/full system at this scale. The flexibility of the network allows to include in the system the ever-changing conditions of landscape and infrastructures, easily adapting to an enormous amount of possibly pre-existing situations.

Two ecosystems. A multiplicity of lifestyles.

Each node can host up to 2000 people, this reduced scale allowing to deal with the need for a self-sufficient urban unit on different scales.

Flexible, evolutive. Choices in space and time.

The basic shape and the nature of a single node is given by taking into account several parameters: the radius of each node measures about 250 m, which makes the maximal distance inside a pole of 500 m, 5 minutes on foot. This distance determines the diffuse presence of the basic services (day-care, retail, kindergartens, meeting points, small sport structures, local banks, entertainment … ), letting each node work as a city centre in the city and allowing each inhabitant to easily take advantage by this situation.

A vision for Henna.

The public transportation stops are located so that their distance from each point of the town is maximum 500m. The needs for heating can be satisfied, at the scale of a node, by a small CHP plant (combined heating and power) of 2 MW, The energy provided by the CHP, (heating and electricity,) is then distributed in the buildings included in a radius of 250 m, this short distance allowing a very small dispersion. (CHP is most efficient when the heat can be used on site or very close to it).

Site plan - 1/10000.

Like in the old towns, where the “shape” of the districts depended on the need for water and on the access to the market, in this project the dimensions of the nodes are similarly determined by the needs, in terms of energy, of “urban life” and easy pedestrian access to services .

Site plan - 1/5000. Timespan evolution of the city

The single nodes are crossed by a large boulevard which is the backbone of the transportation system, works as the main path for the public transport (electric bus), and is associated to cars and bike lanes.

Energy

The issue of ecological efficiency is taken as a key point for the process of designing the town and it influences the orientations at each level. A holistic approach helps conceiving a strategy that takes into account a whole range of multiple processes, parameters and actors influencing one another.

The efficiency is always considered as a design tool, taken as a basic parameter and never as a slogan added in the end of the conception. Neither is it a mechanical calculation that doesn’t take into account the economical, social and spacial impact of each choice.

Two ecosystems, a multiplicity of lifestyles

The shape of the urban nodes guarantees the continuity of the existing ecosystems, adapts itself progressively to the specific features of the territory and absorbs the impact of infrastructures. The two systems (urban/landscape) are in a continuous interdependency:

- Agriculture areas produce biomass which generates energy for heating. The agricultural production of the areas nearby can be partially sold in the urban markets and consumed by the town population, obtaining direct connection between production and consume without wasting energy in the transportation (30 m2 of agricultural land feeds the vegetable needs for one person in a year).

- Forests are O2 producers. Regenerative forests closed to the town provide building materials, cutting the costs of transportation, while wood waste is used as fuel (pellet) to get energy through the CHPs.

- Landscape is seen as an infrastructure, hosting bike paths and footpaths and connecting the different districts. - Citizen can be employed in the management and cultivation of the territories. - Playful activities, sport, learning can take place in those areas of the city/ecosystem allowing people to live at the same time in a dense and intense urban context while being in a close contact with nature: this double perception of the overall urban context helps improving the variety of the urban tissue and the diversity of lifestyles.

This new model of town is seen as a synthesis between the needs of contemporary citizen to be in contact to a lively environment close to work and leisure opportunities, which is usually intended to be in a city, and a more relaxed and independent way of living, closed to nature and “related” to open spaces.

Those last needs led worldwide to the constant presence of urban sprawl: large territory-consuming units, car dependent and anti-urban conditions. While not endorsing this kind of attitude more and more present nowadays, we must understand the basic will behind it and try to imagine urban conditions which can be attractive for larger segments of population.

Flexible, evolutive

The density mixity (co-presence and distribution of multiple functions) is an important indicator taken into account: it is usually a characteristic of city centres and it disappears in mono-functional suburban areas. Here it informs each sector of the city and it is usually obtained as an hybridization of the residential types. This is made possible by choosing structures that can be used for residential, as well as for offices and retail, opened to possible changes of destinations through time. This flexibility helps to absorb future changing of uses and needs in the town.

New forms of working (such as remote working) have been taken into account leading to a multiplicity of spaces. These range from small units directly connected to the residential unit to “open studio” in the block, big spaces that can be shared and rented for different periods, even time of the day or the week, allowing to optimize resources in common, to bigger spaces, in direct connection to public transportation.

The new Henna and its territory

Our proposal for an innovative town is extremely adaptable to a large variety of possible existing conditions, so that the landscape has to be shaped only in minimal part, in order to fit the new implantation. We took the special existing features of the Henna site: infrastructure, topography, presence of forests and agriculture etc. and included them in the planning from the beginning. We then found the locations for the single nodes/districts and adapted the shape of the new infrastructures, to connect them with the existing network. The theoretical approach appears perfectly suitable for Henna since its territory is characterized nowadays by very strong ecosystems and a complexity of different productive environments. These last can be integrated in the planning; used as a contributors for the production of energy; be preserved by the town implantation and even be fed by the fertilizer the town itself will produce. The site specific features and identity will not be erased but will be enlighten by their new relationship.

The margins of the single nodes follow the agricultural limits, the existing topographic features and, like platforms overlooking the sea, they become territories from where one can be confronted to the landscape’s beauty and complexity. The linear parks run through the districts like canals, but they are also infrastructures: going across them, one can reach different points of town, while always staying in an natural though urban ambience.

Henna identity: ecology is not a label

The idea is to promote a town which is self sufficient, ecological and energetically efficient, while not associating it to the cliché of the “eco-city” and its nowadays ubiquitous “aesthetics”. Here, a small ecological footprint is obtained by restoring a close contact and exchange with the surrounding territory, optimizing the town shape to the mobility issues, the energy production and saving and using up to date technologies to re-interpret the archetypical relationship town/nature. We have chosen not to expose the contemporary high tech tools as a flag that would only help to get a easy, (and easily obsolescent), “ecological image”, for a fast acknowledgement. While still encouraging inhabitants’ consciousness of their role in keeping a small footprint, we still think their role as citizens cannot only be limited to their awareness toward the town efficiency. Their will of belonging to this town cannot only be related to its ecological features or image.

Overcoming of the old town/landscape dichotomy

The domestic ambiances, the everyday space that connote a town, here meets a territory that has become no longer familiar for contemporary urban inhabitants. The ambiguous geographies of a land to discover are merged with the urban fabric, creating stripes of lands through the buildings.

These spaces, where the built environment is therefore suspended, are constitutive parts of the town: this territory becomes a strong part of the urban unit, not its opposition. While the town gets a territorial dimension, the territory assumes an urban character. The two subjects establish different layers of relationships through a strategic presence of mixed uses in both of them and the definition of new, lighter infrastructures.

A new way of living in a town

Henna will get the richness of a big city, where there are always new areas to explore and events to be surprised from, with the advantages of a smaller scale town, where work and opportunities are close and a sense of community characterizes the urban life.

At the same time its special relationship with its territory will give birth to a completely new concept of town where the limit between the built and natural environment is faded. The feeling of inhabiting an urban unit will be completely reinvented. Everyday people can choose their way to go to work and live the town, the transportation they use, the landscape they cross.

Europaconcorsi Beta

SYMBIOSIS