[14] Uber-modern Tokyo & poverty struggling Dhaka. Alienation vs. Community.

The way in which we have started this years project was to identify a problem and respond to it. I started to investigate the worlds biggest issue which is overpopulation and growth of megacities. I was looking at the statistics of how the population rate jumped from 1 at the beginning of XVIII century to 7 millions in 2011, and how it more than doubled in just 30 years (between 1970 and 2000). Was I also found that is that in 2008 we have reached the point where urban dwellers outnumbered those living in traditional rural areas. And as the time progresses and at this rate it will only get bigger so there are prognosis that in 2030, three in five people will live in the city. 

I started to speculate what the city of the future would look like. I was researching the films (5th Element, Blade Runner and Alien) as best examples of designing for future urban fabric, as those cities were really conceived (either physical or 3d models). I was really drawn to the idea of city growing on the city like in 5th Element. Were this 23rd century metropolis is turned into a vertical city where its original essence of New York survived. Unlike in China now were cities no longer have the sense of its own past but are swallowed by steel and glass giants, where you have to demolish old to build new. Heritage and conservation is nonexistent. 

I started to investigate the worlds biggest megacities (crowded, polluted, noisy but also most exciting and stimulating) like Tokyo (being the biggest) but also Dhaka in Bangladesh (being poorest) or Mexico City (the highest cime level). And I started to pick up on weird things that are happening there. For example, the Tokyo is so vast and overpopulated it is becoming more and more dehumanized, robotic and mechanical in terms of social relation ships, were people are rented out for friendship. Whereas the Dhaka’s slums are much more normal ad friendly because of the closeness of its inhabitants and also because there is so much happening outside their huts - cooking and social activities are much more alive there that in uber-modern Tokyo. Same in Mexico City where you have people dancing in the streets on Sundays, eating together in tacos bars and making friends as they go alone. 

We are becoming urbanised so quickly our genes are not keeping up with us, maybe we are not ready to live in such vast metropolises. Issues of alienation, depression etc.

My program will be to design a housing complex or single housing unit for my vertical future city which will facilitate residents integration as opposed to megacity’s mechanical coldness.

So, an urban hive (one building) of small family cells and reasonably big in-between communal spaces. I will be also thinking how to use every bit of space available - building roof for small football pitch etc. In an essence how to bring the village back to the city (scapes).