ESSENTIAL CITY
New Urban Typologies for Sustainable Desert Cities
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WELCOME
BACKGROUND
Desert cities are the frontline of climate change. In addition to their extraordinary energy and water needs, they give us a peek at what cities across the world could eventually experience if temperatures are allowed to increase unchecked.
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Sound Space Design Architects and Desert Developments bring you an exploration of a new kind of city for the Californian desert, Essential City. By intervening with an amalgam of existing desert cities in the Coachella Valley and Morongo Basin, Essential City is a real-world manifesto for sustainable settlements that, whilst generating clean energy and food, also blend retirement living, resort-living and the kind of hospitality the greater Palm Springs Area is renown for, with the affordable housing that the area so clearly needs.
METHODOLOGY
The manifesto is hypothetical and ongoing, and proposes various spatial and technological innovations for resilient eco-social improvements to existing desert cities.
Derived from traditional urban design, architecture and planning methodology, and bolstered by research into other desert-appropriate climatic innovations and the latest thinking in sustainability and technology, the concepts are expanded and brought to life with the creative potential of generative AI guided by our hands and minds.
Essential City focusses on three key scales of intervention, with feedback between the scales informing each other:
CITY SCALE
The urban morphology (the shape of cities) is one of the most important criteria in terms of the efficiency of cities and their ability to offer equal access to its citizenry and improve the cost of living. Californian desert cities are dominated by the Jeffersonian Grid but, more crucially, the land-use planning and single-use zoning which has traditionally favoured automobile transportation over pedestrian and public transportation reinforces inequality and fuels climate change. In Essential City we work within some of these constraints and challenge others where we see profound benefits.
NEIGHBORHOOD SCALE
Recently there has been a lot of attention towards the creation of; the 15-Minute City, sustainable urbanism and, the remaking of safe, low-traffic, walkable neighborhoods with improved social and commercial amenities at the center of them. The concept of Third Places and public open-space networks providing linkages between neighborhoods and as a hierarchical grouping system within the city has allowed Essential City to radically alter the character of the typical Californian desert city.
BUILDING SCALE
Finally, at the building scale, Essential City Proposes a series of new urban typologies of mixed-use buildings including:
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TYPE A: Additional Dwelling Units
TYPE B: Meandering Courtyard Residential
TYPE C: Row Houses with Corner Shops
TYPE D: Veiled Bigness
TYPE E: Agglomerated ADUs
TYPE F: Mixed-Use Neighborhood Retail
TYPE G: Education & Student Housing
TYPE H: Resort Residential
TYPE G: Urban Farming
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ESSENTIAL CITY
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