The appearance of the hyper dense and suburban mega city in the twentieth century is unprecedented: urban formations that are manufacturing challenges, never before seen nor encountered in human history. Leaving out the hyper dense city, as demonstrated cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai and New York, low-density suburban cities such as Dallas / Fort Worth, Atlanta and Phoenix are typical, generic and so standardized in their origination that solutions for one offers hope and opportunity to others through collaboration, conversation and cultural exchange.
For the governmental jurisdictions and agencies that overlap within a suburban mega city geography to converse and collaborate productively, a shared language and clear understanding of typical issues, characteristics and possibilities, needs clear and quantifiable identification.
Results/Conclusions
This presentation will use Dallas Fort Worth as a textbook demonstration of a typical suburban mega city - a case study and network of issues, measurements and empirical observations. Mapping, analyzing and clearly understanding the qualities and quantities of typical suburban mega cities map the broad strokes as a new kind of common ground for political, environmental and architectural discourse.
In lieu of nomenclature such as “sprawl,” this presentation will seek to objectively quantify and share issues and observations that have emerged through decades of research by Kevin Sloan Studio. Some of the topics covered will include an overview of density and how the one-person-per-acre average human density of the mega region presents stupefying problems to future densification, transit, environmental management and humanization. On the flip side of each issue shared, this presentation will reveal how the same negative issues offer new and unprecedented opportunities when seen through a different analytical lens. For example, while the exceptionally thin density presents densification challenges it has simultaneously enabled wild life to infiltrate and flourish within a suburban city. When embraced in this light, the suburban mega city may offer a new kind of potential where city and nature can co-exist continuously, as One Landscape.
New energy conscious construction models, revolutions in water conservation, and transportation as well as job distribution will be covered in this session to hopefully further the development of a new and productive language for mega regions.