a) The interest in participating in a contest like Building A Sustainable World: Life in the Balance
lies in presenting a proposal that, from the architecture and the urbanism, would give an
answer to the necessity of rationalization of the human settlements on the planet without
contributing to the deterioration of environment, without it must suppose greater economic cost
and without resigning to the degree of progress and comfort reached by the today society, in
the same way like the other sectors of the economic activity do.
Aware that a considerable part of the global heating of the planet dues to the mobility of the
people and to the traffic of merchandise; at the moment of greater population of history, with
predominance of the tertiary sector of the economy and the digital technology in the highly
developed economies, with great part of the active population occupying places of work
perfectly compatible with the residence and the next reconciliation between city and
automobile, in pass this last one, from a noisy and polluting traction to quiet and clean other
one - as it happened, in its day, with the railroad - the proposal of district to consider is a
generic version, in new plant, of that could be understood like Sustainable District, although, at
the beginning of XXI century, the most respectful to environment district could be the existing
ones, if the public transport were solved, in the case of a disperse urbanization, or if it were
acted by determined form on the construction, in the case of a compact weave and with
diversity of uses.
Unlike the city - understood as the place of the interchange, mainly of merchandise and
consumer goods before and of information and services now; where, in addition, spaces and
representative buildings of the citizenship must be harboured - the district must make possible
the development of the basic human activity (residence, work/secondary studies, primary
supplying, daily leisure…) with the minimum physical, economic and environmental cost. It
allows acting on great scale, with the consequent increase of effectiveness and economy, but it
must be completed with the medium scale of the building and the small one of the dwelling and
the other uses put in order.
In general, it is setting out a unit like the passive space mechanism, whose design should allow
that its implantation, the development of activity in its heart, the treatment of the generated
wastes, the water and energy saving and itself constitution like a structure that closes, in the
greater proportion and in the greater amount possible, the service lives of materials and
procedures.
The presented implantation on the territory proposes an intensive use of itself, a great density
of population and a systematization of the superposition of differed uses, looking for the
balance between the constructed space and the free space, and between the residential
construction and not-residential one and the exoneration of forced motorized mobility, for which
there are set out three main zones clearly delimited for the development of the life in the district:
the zone of construction, the opened green zone and the free of construction non-opened zone.
The opened green zone is the free of construction space, preferably wooded, without restriction
of access for the people and served by the public transport.
The free of construction non-opened zone - with restricted access - is conformed by uses that
are produced outdoors by certain people or groups, and that need, because of their nature, to
have the access controlled (for example, sport and agricultural areas) and that contains, in
addition, such facilities that are convenient to move away from the built and inhabited zone.
The zone of construction occupies a half of the proposal and in order for this, there are get
together the uses - excluding the great industry and the dangerous activities - compatible with
the residence, distinguishing them in urban and non-urban. The urban uses are those that, on
account of its nature, make possible the definition of the city described before (equipments,
commerce, offices, small industry, hotel management...) creating and receiving flows of people
and causing a great tension between the built and private interior and the free and public
outside. The non-urban uses are those which don’t contribute to the previous definition of city,
that parasite or desert it or that, by its nature, obstruct its normal operation (dwelling, great
industry, routes of territorial communication...)
Total Surface: 200 hectares
Construction Zone Surface: 100 hectares
Green Zone with free access Surface: 50 hectares
Note: The magnitudes are expressed in units of the Metric Decimal System
Free Zone with restricted access Surface: 50 hectares
Construction Zone Occupation: 52,36 %
Road Construction Zone: 47,64 %
Net Building (over construction zone): 6,28 m2/m2 land
Gross Building (over the totality of the land): 3,14 m2/m2 land
Population: 105.000 inhabitants
Gross Density: 525 persons/hectare
Free green zone dowry: 4,76 m2/persons
Total free zones dowry: 9,52 m2/persons
There are two different and complementary ways for adopting housing forms on level with the
ground. Thus, the called urban uses occupy the zone level of public space from the first
basement to the fifth plant with such volumes dominated by the dimension in horizontal, the
continuity of the facades, the superiority of the mass as opposed to the emptiness and the clear
separation between the public space and the private space; by this way, it’s obtained a great
effect of urban continuity, made easy the encounter of the construction with the land and its
possible accidents - topography, trees of a forest, water courses or tables...- and with the
existing urban weaves, constituting itself in continuous with the wooded masses, and a height
in the skirting board of the construction that solves its delivery to the ground. In addition to the
work places, these volumes must be able to contain anyone of the habitual equipment of a
district. In this part of the construction the dwelling use is prohibited, but not other residential
forms, like the hotels that are easily integrated into the urban dynamics. Each unit of this part of
the construction will be arranged with 28 m2/job place or school place for approximately the
70% of the population that resides in the same unit (2.380 persons) plus 10 m2/persons of
equipment for the 100% of the residents. The great dowry of equipment responds to the
necessity to anticipate the fact that some of them consume surface without arriving to construct
it (religious temples, sport complex pavilions, theatres, and so on…) The great industry has
been completely secreted from the district and the great routes of communication (which allows
to enter) are in peripheral position. It is considered that, approximately, 30% of resident
population are not-active or works outside the district.
The second way to formalize the district proposes the location of the dwelling, as little
compatible use with the idea of the described city, in the over placed space to the occupied one
by the urban uses and with such dwelling typology, where the vertical dimension predominates,
prevailing the emptiness over the built mass, being geometrically independent of the
conditioners of the land, easily optimized the orientation and where are obtained, without
difficulty, the conditions of habitability and privacy that the use of the house demands. The
high-rise construction facilitates the adoption of passive strategies for the power efficiency:
direct solar contribution, crossed ventilation, natural illumination… In this part of the
construction is proposed an occupation of 18m2/persons like an average between so different
large dwellings (42.840 m2 and 2.380 persons by unit).
The built entity proposes the systematization of the mixture of uses on the land looking for the
balance between not-residential and residential surfaces, from which comes off an intensive
use of the territory that releases great part of itself - a bet by highly dense population, low
repercussion on the urbanization costs, a great advantage by using the generated flows of
people, especially, the dwelling one, and making easy the resolution of sectors problematic
(energy, water, remainders, mobility...) that all human settlements entail. Half of the total
surface (200 hectares) is occupied by the zone of construction and road, and the lateral ones
are occupied by the free green zone and the free of construction zone, but with restricted
access - to compose freely, according to the necessities of each implantation -, therefore an
addition of similar districts can give rise to great parks, sport or agricultural zones that are
integrated in the whole urban by their values such landscaping and pedagogical, as of
nutritional contribution to the population, free from great necessities of transport, and clean as a
reason of providing the first absorption units of emissions. The free of construction zones must
be understood like minims to be completed with other similar zones, so that the unit
approaches to emission zero.
The form and regularity of the built block at the level of the street with its unequal dimensions
allows having a great space wealth and a clear hierarchical structuring of the road spaces and
profusion of different urban situations due to the continuities/facultative discontinuities,
making possible the existence of groupings from smaller scale (sub-districts), perfectly defined
and connected.
b) The scale of the district allows to approach the problematic of sectors by a unitary way,
looking for synergies that contribute to the combined solutions and, minimally, to the global
heating. The balance between the residential ceiling and the non-residential one allows the fact
that, in a very high percentage, the displacements by forced mobility and great part of the
facultative one can be made by foot, bicycle… or, in its absence, with a brief passage by public
transport, and exonerates to double the dowry of parking places. The motorized access to the
district, as much public as private, will be made only by the main streets, from where it will be
possible to access to the rest of the plot - capillary routes of access to the construction. One
sets out, in addition, to release the traffic of people and public transport, which will enjoy the
street as the main public space, accentuating its character of encounter space of the particular
motorized traffic that is located in trench, in an inferior level, emphasized like a crossing site
and next to the galleries of urban services, losing the habitual barrier effect of the rolled traffic
in surface and the conflict with the pedestrians and disabling the parking in the public space.
Placing peripherally the main routes of access and hierarchying the plot allow serving to the
unit in a one-way street as circulation free from crossing levels. This road disposition turns first
the cellar basement plants, in addition to its habitual functions, in the main modal interchanger
of the set, that is able to be integrated in space with the set on level and where the works of
loading and unloading must be made, the taking and cession of passage of the taxis and the
selective collection of the not-organic fractions of urban solid remainders. The superposition of
uses and the great surface in plant of the not-residential zone allow solving the dowry of
parking with a reduced number of cellar plants, below the first basement cellar - an important
question where the water table is superficial.
The dimension of the public spaces, the selection of urban tree-lined of deciduous leaf and,
especially, the residential building typology, together with a high level of isolation, the adoption
of constructive systems of the great thermal inertia that allow power storage, the air
conditioning by the radiation system, the optimization of the natural illumination, the crossed
ventilation, the selection of materials coming from the recycling and, at the same time,
recyclables as the passive strategies are, and that together with the use of radiating covers and
the geothermal energy for refrigeration (or heating in very cold climates), the active thermal and
photovoltaic solar capture and the installation of wind energy mini-generators with a vertical
rotor, according to the specific conditions of each geographic enclave, forming a very efficient
power unit that is complemented with the joint production of electricity by co-generation or the
Hydrogen manufacture, that uses the methane gas as combustible, produced in an anaerobic
digester fed by black waters from the odourless and the sinks from the kitchens that, equipped
with domestic crushing machines, canalize the organic fraction of the urban solid remainders. In
a country as Spain (with a middle consumption per capita of natural gas between 0.5 and 1.0
m3/day and a production, per capita, of 1 kilogram/day of urban solid remainders and 50% of
organic fraction) the optimized methane production by the described system, without more
contribution than the one coming from the human population, could approach 50% of the whole
consumed at the moment. The process also produces about 400 gram/day of odourless
effluent and wealthy about nutrients that, once centrifuged, produces water and solid remainder
apt for the production of fodder for the cattle or instalment for the agricultural production (500
m2 of cultivated earth can support the 75% of the nutritional necessities of a person, if there are
the amounts of nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium contributed and that annually produces
and releases, by urine). In countries with such a nutritional regime where the fish abounds (link
of the trophic chain that assimilates part of phosphorus deposited in the sea), the system would
help to the closing of the service life of phosphorus at the moment when there are only left
some tens of years of life of the world-wide phosphate deposits with the exception of the both
great of Africa, which are the present suppliers of the necessary phosphorus for the
development of the life. On the global scale, if it existed leftover of agricultural instalment, it
could be used to fight the present advance of the deserting in so many territories and to
promote the reforestation in others.
The gray waters are separated from the blacks and from the pluvial ones, so that in the own
construction they can be treated and used again in the toilets. The leftover will be treated, at
the level of set, by a ponding equipped with aquatic plants that make their purification by using
the treated, non-potable waters, for all type of urban uses.
The produced biomass, once crushed, will also feed the digester of gas production. Part of the
produced in the co-generation process heat will be used in the thermal preparation of the
digester and the glass of the ponding in order to improve its efficiency.
The pluvial waters from covers and public spaces are collected separately and after a pre-cure
they are stored together with the coming from the biological cleaner for uses of irrigation, public
cleaning and supplying of the network anti-fires with an overflow connected to the water table
that also allows the extraction of water at times of drought. In case of saturation, a second
overflow will lead the leftover to a superficial water course.
c) We would make proposals sufficiently attractive, as much for the great public as by the
politicians with competitions on urbanism, energy, water… in order to understand that the great
part of the global heating and the other structural problems of the planet - unequal distribution
of the water, deserting, power supplying…- are intimately linked to our daily behaviour, and
that it is possible, without resigning the obtained standard of life and without great economic
additional cost, to diminish our ecological track. The reduction of forced mobility, the
inescapable entailment of agriculture and the reforestation with the city like absorption
mechanisms of the emissions of CO2, where they take place, the rationalization of the
production and the consumption of energy and water along to the segregation of the city only of
those territorial uses, that are absolutely incompatible with it, are the great questions to confront
by the urbanism of the future.
d) The main obstacles in the materialization of the proposal would be:
- The great scale of the proposal – vast units of buildings, great public spaces…- which
are not always adaptable to the size of medium or small populations;
- The adoption of a public space without automobiles, where its parking is always
outside the view (cellar plants) and its trench circulation make lose its present urban main
character and its representative qualities, only leaving its functional qualities;
- The possibility of the fact that an excess of some habitual constituent elements of the
normal regime of life (for example, some medicines like antibiotics…) would make inhibited the
methane gas production in the digester that gathers black waters.
e) The presented proposal generically responds to a tempered climate, where summers and
winters are relatively mild, although the main proposal to locate closely together all those uses
that allow the development of the daily life without large motorized displacements is universal.
Also, it would be some of the conditions of the construction (good level of isolation, use of inner
thermal inertia, use of renewable energies, facility of selective collection of solid urban
remainders, saving and rationalization in the use of the water…)
It should to vary, according to the climatic and geographic zone, the global strategy on
schedule to the availability of the basic elements (for example, in high latitudes it will be
prioritized the strategy of power supplying above the use of the given water, due to its vast
availability; in tropical climates, in general, the global strategy would have to be, practically, the
opposite). It should to vary, also, the passive strategies of air conditioning, in base if there is
necessary the protection from the sun or the accumulation of its power contribution; the
selection of the renewable or technical energies to use according to availabilities (in high
latitudes, mainly, the geothermic one and the biomass for the heating and production of hot
water and in low latitudes the solar energy for the hot water production and geothermal for the
inner refrigeration).