Densification in urban areas requires comprehensive urban planning and architectural design in order to achieve efficient use of built spaces, natural resources and energy through integrated planning and design strategies.
Urbanisation is a global phenomenon that has constantly changed our world throughout the history. Although it has increasingly improved our quality of life, urbanisation has also pushed to a critical edge our relations with the natural environment, urban ecosystems and resources supply.
Take Zurich as an example: as the biggest city in Switzerland, Zurich is facing the challenge of accommodating additional 100,000 residents (1/4 of the current population) in the coming decade.
Providing decent spaces for living, working, commuting, and entertaining, but without expanding the urban footprint, requires us to redevelop the city with high density.
By densifying existing urban areas, cities can be developed in three dimensions and limit the phenomenon of urban sprawl: building structures may become the new ground level for daily activities to compensate their footprints on the ground and more spaces can be free to support biodiversity and ecosystems.
Although the relationship between densification and the liveability of cities is complex, high-density can only come hand-in-hand with high liveability: through attentive planning and mindful design, high density will result in increased efficiencies in energy and space use, with a consequent low impact on nature and the environment, resulting in high liveability.
Contemporary urban planning and design practice is looking more and more at the development of what we call Sustainable Integrated Districts - or SIDs - as a model for high-density, high-liveability future cities. SIDs aim to fully realize the potential of urban innovations and systems solutions by deploying and applying them at the district scale. The concepts of density and sustainability in SIDs are seen as mutually dependent and synergistic. Understanding the performance of SIDs in relation to conventional planning models in such different contexts as Singapore, Zurich, London, and Amsterdam helps expand our understanding of their potential as effective models for future urban developments. studying them in detail also helps identify factors needed for the successful implementation of SIDs and the sorts of planning instruments and governance arrangements that will be necessary to enable such developments in different socio-spatial contexts.
Rapid urbanisation is a growing threat to the environment and food security across Asia. Cities are sprawling at unprecedented rates, consuming fertile agricultural land as they do so. On the other hand, there is a massive demand in the housing market for more affordable living on the city’s outskirts that needs to be met.
This is why many developers acquire farmlands and turn them into low-rise, single-family housing real estate. These developments usually consume a large footprint due to their low density.
Yet in Monsoon Asia, the rural does not immediately give way to the urban, and instead, a hybrid rural-urban typology emerges.
Protect the existence of adjacent rice fields and farmland, and even add more productivity and liveability to the current peri-urban area of the city: These are possible suggestions for a new settlement model desirable for the residents, farmers, developers, and local government.
We call this innovative prototype settlement: the ‘Agropolitan Seed Town’. Within a bioregional development framework, it integrates high-density, mixed-use eco-neighbourhoods, vertical gardens, community-supported farms, and mobile produce markets. The Seed Town showcases innovative biomaterials, decentralised technology, and blue-green infrastructure, which adds value without damaging the environment. Working with a renowned local developer in Indonesia, a 1:1 scale urban design model has been built on a 14-hectare site in the municipality of Cikarang, West Java, 40 km from downtown Jakarta.
Emerging Models of Sustainable Integrated Development explores sustainable integrated districts (SIDs) as models for high-density high- liveability future cities by studying urban innovations and systems solutions that are deployed and integrated at the district scale. Important aspects of the system performance of SIDs are captured by an interdisciplinary team of researchers that works closely with important stakeholders from government agencies and industry.
Find out more aboutThe Agropolitan Territories module addresses the unsustainable relationship between urbanisation and food production in monsoon Asia. Globally, urban land expansion is consuming fertile agricultural land at unprecedented rates. Simultaneously, the industrialised agricultural practices developed to meet the food needs of urbanised populations are placing pressure on a range of ecological systems. The module is developing an 'agropolitan' outlook to this challenge, foregrounding the inter-dependence of future cities and future agriculture. It is doing so by developing transdisciplinary and multi-scaled approaches to data collection and analysis, dynamic planning support tools, and designs and prototypes for sustainable agropolitan territories.
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Sustainable Development Goals
