The basic driving force for any type of
real estate or urban development: if you want success the place must
have residential, everyday living appeal. Morning, noon, afternoon,
evening and night time.
Success meaning that people want to
live there, have their kids live there, buy property there, invest
their money there. There is no other romantic or sentimental drive
but environmental, urban, social, architectural appeal and consistent
quality services. (education, shopping, entertainment, sports,
culture, food, theatre, health, performing arts, music, dance, cafès,
urban landscape…architecture).
That is where the money goes, and you
want to be where the money goes, and you want to design an urban
context, a built environment context, a set of amenities and services
that will yield precisely that result.
The leading feature to support and
contain all these things is urban landscape
a landscape made of buildings, gardens, greens, useful
urban gadgets (energy technologies?) social gathering spots,
lookouts.…beware of monuments (they can be really dull).
Midland now is ANYTHING
but that.
It’s an ugly place, with an ugly
set of decaying industrial buildings, with an ugly wide railway track
crossing it, with old closed decaying pubs and huge squallid parking
lots for commuters deserted at nights, deserted during the week-ends.
Hot tarmac wastelands under the WA brilliant sun.
Nothing now in Midland could be
conceivably more far away from a desirable place where to live.
Urban Landscape
The landscape of a “future city” no
sprawl, no ugly little boxes on 300 square meters lots, with
miserable “green” spaces two meters wide around.
Tall buildings, high density (8 to 12
storeys high), spatially organized in a mode that I would call
“aerial”, volumes connected by bridges, terraces, pensile
walkways, pensile gardens, pensile trees, may be water falls (do
not be shy go for it!), wind generators above, look out spots
and overhanging balconies.
All parking lots to be underground and
above them buidings or gardens. Most of automobile circulation
underground. Above cycle paths and pedestrian walkways winding around
artificial hills.
A HUGE lake conceived to be a climate
control tool and designed for swimming and surfing (an artificial
wave? Or the surfing waterfall. Check the pool with artificail wave
in Phoenix Arizona).
The huge problem is the bloody railway:
cover it with a long garden overpass? A shopping mall? Whatever ….?
It is really ugly and maybe the cost of covering it is less than the
cost of diverting it around the Helena River (??) or wherever…
Your guys can elaborate on this if you
like it. Do not need to quote me: take what you want throw way what
you do not like.
Remember the first title of this
exercise: off the beaten track.
It’s a Christmas present!
Lorenzo
(to be continued)
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