gu: Growing Urbanism

a living city prototype

[gu] envisions a new paradigm applicable to cities and suburbs around globe 25 years into the future. [gu] created a prototype for an area of Seattle on Elliott Bay on the south edge of downtown for detailed development and study

[gu] was initially developed as entry for the Living City Design Competition and awarded with the “Images that provoke” award, recognizes that a living city is not possible in the absence of greater, interconnected ecosystems and suggests initiating interventions that enable a living adaptive responsive city. These interventions would allow the city to evolve new relationships with nature reestablishing dynamic exchanges that allow natural rebalancing of the intricate web of ecological maintenance. Growing Urbanism is not intended as a prescriptive, fixed or static model but one that is indeterminate, ever-evolving the urban condition toward a state of merging with lost or forgotten inherent qualities of place.

Divided into three distinct concepts, this proposal takes advantage of the inherent qualities of different parts of the city utilizing the richness that each provides while closing the loop on resources and requirements to enable the city to function in a more sustainable and self sufficient manner. Augmentation using biological re-emergence, synthetic biology, exponential data and the natural intelligence is based on the principles of self-organization and soft engineering as the foundation for an adaptive and robust urban condition that ultimately reverses our current state of environmental degradation.

Living City Design competition

awarded  “Images that Provoke” special recognition