Envision of a City Ideal: Draft 1

The Megacity Ideal

Density:

A city; a tight urban mass of complex spatial organisms and infrastructure, reaches its optimum prime as it approaches the scale of a ‘megacity’; a large collective hub of inhabitants and structures.

Tighter urban footprints can be achieved within megacities as structures within the city become cities within cities; larger mega-structures which house the complexities of all necessary functions. Vertical based structures with internal movements would eliminate the private vehicles from a large proportion of the city, & would hence reduce the footprint considerably further.

As the city grows to become more complex the city will suit a compact structure, with fixed boundaries and clearly define perimeters. Urban sprawl will be reversed, by which interconnections between existing buildings and communities will tauten and grow within pockets of the city boundaries, and mega-structures are expanded upwards & adapted to the larger increases of population. Networks will be sustained higher up in the field of the city which becomes ever more vertical.

Frugality:

Urban density = efficiency. The city becomes a collective whole, & the inhabitants become valuable as a group. Larger densities can sustain larger services and better public infrastructures which will not become weakened and strained by low density suburban patterns. More services are accessible to a larger amount of inhabitants. Everything & everyone within the city is able to exist close to its means.

Giving Back the Land:

As urban migration to the city increases, leaving only a few rural outposts outside the perimeters of the mega-cities, extensive amounts of land, now made available from the abandoned thin blanket of intensive suburban sprawl, can be reverted back to wilderness, restoring the world’s damaged natural ecosystems.

Although this tight urban mass at first seems to detach its inhabitants from the natural world, further insight would suggest an even greater contact with the extreme nature as proximity to true wilderness could be reached, linked directly outside the perimeter of the new tighter city borders.