Our scheme proposes to thicken the arteries of our burbs as the remedy for their future. New housing is proposed above the roadways in-between the existing suburban fabric. The density of the burb is dramatically increased. The new housing promotes a new typology. A sinuous ribbon that weaves between the McMansions promoting mixed forms of living that offers an alternative to the single family dwelling.

Smaller housing modules, shared housing and extended family living are all accommodated in the strip. Opportunities for community interaction are increased. The ‘backyard’ is relocated to the roof, and becomes community parkland, providing new recreational opportunities and a new view of suburbia. The new density increases the patronage of public transport making the system more sustainable.

When the strip converges at an intersection the strands cluster and rise vertically to create a mini-city of apartments. These clusters of high density living encourage the development of support services around their base. The rooftop parkland becomes the façade of the towers transforming into a vertical garden.

When the strip terminates, the ubiquitous cul-de-sac creates the opportunity for a unique suburban event space such as skate park, gallery, restaurant or perhaps just a new take on the ‘corner store’.

In time the patterns of living in these commuter suburbs shifts. People want to live in the strip. The demand for the McMansion falters. Slowly they are replaced by parkl

Airbia proposes a new eco-friendly and efficient transportation system linking the suburbs and city centre. Corresponding to the lack of coherent public transportation in the majority of the sprawling cities, a set of airships is designed to form an additional network over the urban tissue.

The proposed network bases its flexibility on the limited required infrastructure (just overground platforms) and facilities, easy hovering, landing and passenger access. The target is to develop a set of routes covering nodal points of the suburbia, travelling all the way to the borders of the city centre creating a ring around it. This network would potentially replace the use of cars and trains as transportation between the suburbs and the city centers.

Being inspired by the zeppelin technologies, the proposed airship engages the idea using helium to hover, which is proven to be a sustainable and economical approach.
The proposed airship has a capacity to carry 400 people and travel with an avarage of 150 km/h speed on a hight between 30 – 500 meters. Instead of having a major airship station, Airbia proposes a more dispersed network of station-platforms, that constist of staircases, lifts and ticket spaces. This way the system becomes much more flexible, since these drop off – pick up platforms can be placed almost anywhere in the city.

As more businesses in the old suburbs vacate, either going out of business or moving to the new suburbs, large expanses of retail and parking lot real-estate become empty. This empty obsolescence is an opportunity for a new kind of business and landscape: It’s an opportunity to reclaim the productive pastoral atmosphere of the land before sprawl.

This landscape would not be of an antiquated culture or a superficial culture, but a layering of ideals – sustainable practices of the past, new energy efficient technologies, and contemporary culture.

The example presented is a reversal of a function for a big box grocery store, from retailer of food – food detached from processes from which it came to be – to producer of food. The parking lot becomes a park-farm. The inside of the big box becomes a greenhouse and restaurant. Asphalt farming techniques allow for layering of soil, compost in containers on top of asphalt. The big box store’s roof is partially replaced with a greenhouse roof. Other details, such as the reversal of parking lot light poles into solar trees that hold photovoltaics can be implemented. One can imagine pushing a shopping cart through this suburban farm and picking your produce right from the vine, with the option to bring your harvest to the restaurant chef for preparation and eating your harvest on the spot. As other types of businesses become obsolete, out of fashion, they may need to imagine themselves as part of a productive suburb.

For the Biofuel movement to flourish it will require cheap, flat, modular space networked into national and state highway systems. Abandoned big box stores provide these conditions. With little investment, these flat pavement deserts could be converted to bio-fuel generators.

Currently, algae represents the strongest case as a feedstock: it is inexpensive, it grows on waste nutrients, and it produces on the order of 5000-15,000 gallons of oil per acre per year. That’s 10x its next yield competitor (palm oil)! Algae-oil, now emblazoned oilgae, is perfectly suited for production in modular bio-refineries inhabiting abandoned big box stores. Further, the ample parking lot space could better perform as a solar collector array and wind turbine field, ready to recharge new electric vehicles being manufactured and sold by U.S. and foreign auto makers.

Instead of pumping out carbon-intensive goods and consumers, “Big Box Biofuel” absorbs carbon as the algae grow and output clean fuel. Within one abandoned Lowe’s, Home Depot or Wal-Mart – oilgae production could easily exceed 100,000 gallons per year. With solar and wind power adding around 200 kW of clean electric power per day – numerous electric vehicles could be charged for millions of carbon free miles every year. Get rid of the faux facades and abandoned landscapes, and let’s plug into these infrastructural behemoths with scalable, renewable energy.

Strip malls are everywhere. While they provide convenient access and affordable commercial space for a diverse tenant mix, their expansive surface parking and lack of human-scaled connection to adjacent neighborhoods have a deadening impact on our communities. A universal shift in the way we treat this pervasive typology: such as converting parking lots into farms – could result in massive change.

PARKING LOT AS FARM. Bumper Crop is a soil-less farm irrigated with reclaimed waste water and suspended above the strip mall parking lot to shade the ground plane and reverse the heat-island effect. By means of a membrane bioreactor, reclaimed water from the city sewer main supplies the overhead crop with nutrient-rich irrigation water creating an oasis in the asphalt desert. Land currently used for parking only is reclaimed for urban agricultural production thereby preserving undeveloped land and repairing the ecosystems that have been sacrificed for soil-based agriculture.

STRIP MALL AS NEIGHBOR. By repurposing its back edge to address the parking lot and the alley, the strip mall becomes accessible by foot for the adjacent residential community. Up-zoning the residential properties adjacent to the strip mall alley allows for live-work structures to promote small business opportunities within walking distance of homes. The vacant alley, a virtual no mans land, is transformed into a vital pedestrian link. The transition from commercial to residential is eased and the pedestrian is invited to reclaim the strip mall site.

The EChO-Mansion is then reconfigured to provide the following functions:
•Power Generation – Wind turbines are situated in window and door openings to provide wind-generated power. Solar (photovoltaic) array panels are situated on the existing roof structure. The electrical energy generated by the wind turbines and solar array panels is supplied back to the electrical grid for customer use.
•Reburbian Greenhouse and Laboratory – The reburbia greenhouse will be utilized to grow vegetables and plants in an effort to offset the carbon footprint generated by transporting plants. A laboratory component will be provided to educate local residents.
•Water Collection System – The basement is proposed to be repurposed to collect rain water that enters the EChO-Mansion. The cistern basement will pump collected water back to a central water filtration and distribution station.
EChO-Mansion is a registered trademark of Mother Earth. Unauthorized use of ‘EChO-Mansion’ will result in far-reaching ecological consequences.

Rather than taking the traditional, additive approach to solving problems, the Entrepreneurbia model simply abolishes poorly conceived zoning laws to attract forward-thinking small business owners and start-up companies. The result is a community of entrepreneurs who transform inefficient single-family dwellings and purely decorative landscape spaces into intelligent home-based businesses.

Rigid zoning laws have created many of the problems typically associated with suburban sprawl. Possibly the largest of these problems is the segregation of residential and commercial spaces. The problem is fairly straight forward. When people do not live, work, shop and eat within walking distance of where they live, extensive transportation infrastructure is needed to allow people to regularly travel greater distances.

In Entrepreneurbia, such problems do not exist. Entrepreneurbia abolishes poorly conceived zoning laws to attract forward-thinking small business owners and start-up companies. The result is a community of entrepreneurs who transform inefficient single-family dwellings and purely decorative landscape spaces into intelligent home-based businesses. From chic shops & showrooms to designer offices, award-winning restaurants, and even boutique farms the new residents of Entrepreneurbia infuse once sterile suburbs with a distinctive sense of character & community.

Eventually, individual Entrepreneurbia communities become self-sustaining as entrepreneurs open profitable businesses that satisfy the needs of the community. This eliminates the need for cars to complete necessary daily activities. Meanwhile, public transit routes are updated, allowing residents to conveniently & sustainably travel between the Entrepreneurbia communities and into the urban cores.

Greyfields, dead malls and ghost boxes are increasing, and they are affecting the suburban community negatively. Compared to an urban environment, suburbia is less efficient and less interactive with its neighbors.

What to do about all those abandoned McMansions? Turn them into wetlands and natural water filtration systems for urban centers.

According to many scientists and climatologists, we are fighting a losing battle against climate change, loss of rain forests and wetlands and extinction of species. Historians who study Maya and Angkor have warned of an inevitable collapse to civilization when natural resources are overused in non-sustainable ways. Many real estate analysts have also predicted that a change of lifestyle, shrink of household size and a rise of energy prices will seal the final downfall of suburbia.

What would be the future of suburbia when McMansions are abandoned?

In response to the anticipated future, the Frog’s Dream project attempts to re-establish a sustainable relationship between city and suburbia. It proposes to transform the vacant McMansions, at the periphery of cities, into eco-water treatment machines, commercially known as Living Machines, in which a micro-ecosystem of plants, algae, bacteria, fish and clams are present to purify the water. A micro-wetland ecosystem will be formed around these mansions to sustain larger wetland animals and plants. The project also involves transforming the highway system into a multi-functional infrastructure that transports cars, trains and bikes, as well as forming a network to facilitate water transport between a city and its surrounding suburban wetlands.

The Frog Dream presents the idea of a highly concentrated city and its ring of suburban wetlands will hold the key to a green future.

How to solve the problem of endless, under-utilized lateral expansion? Convert freeways to farms and build upwards! Left behind in the wake of the past century of unfettered lateral urbanization, the expansive embankments that cradle the American freeway represent one of the greatest untapped spatial fragments of the contemporary built environment. What if, rather than merely lamenting or accepting these non-places as the inevitable detritus of sprawl, these sites could be reclaimed and activated in response to the pressing concerns of our time?

Inter-estates proposes a phased strategy for re-evaluating and repurposing these sites in a scenario of radical transformation that offers new development typologies, unconventional models of finance, and dynamic land use. First, freeway embankments are re-zoned for agricultural use; giving rise to community edible gardening, switchgrass and other forms of bio-fuel production, open space corridors, etc.

Next, the construction of a series of versatile structural pylons accommodates the installation of temporary billboards. Operating like a lamb in wolves’ clothing, revenue generated from the sale of advertising space is in turn invested in future improvements to the site, including retrofitting of the structural pylons to accommodate vertical axis wind turbines. As the advertising campaign is retired, the structural frames of the billboards are left intact as the armatures for future residential uses. Finally, residential development begins to occur vertically along the pylons, which now are retrofitted to accommodate domestic functions.