A team from PennDesign is among three finalists in Urban SOS 2015: All Systems Go, a global student competition co-hosted by AECOM, Van Alen Institute, and 100 Resilient Cities, which was pioneered by the Rockefeller Foundation. Proposals from were judged by an international network of AECOM designers, planners, and engineers as well as colleagues at Van Alen Institute.
The brief called on multi-disciplinary teams of students to envision more resilient food, water, and energy systems for supplying cities and regions today and in the future. Teammates Joseph Rosenberg (MLA'15), Daniel Lau (MArch'16 candidate), and Lindsay L. Rule (MLA/MArch’15) responded with a scheme entitled The Third Reserve that “transforms a vast site of underutilized, undeveloped land in Northeast Singapore into a new reserve where parcels are intensely programmed toward industrial scale food production.”
According to the proposal, the scheme creates a variety of urban districts organized linearly along an infrastructural band which bundles public transportation systems and industrial distribution networks together, forming a spatial filter between the urban fabric and the productive landscape core. The landscape itself provides a supplementary food resource for Singapore's growing population by mixing traditional horticultural methods with alternative, high yield techniques such as vertical, subterranean, and aquaculture farms. This allows for optimized output during the year and opens up land for public recreational use. The Third Reserve provides new urban conditions which promote intensified land use strategies that help frame public corridors, water management systems, and transportation nodes.
This year’s competition culminates in an evening charrette where the three final teams present their schemes to this year’s jury at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles on October 15, 2015. The jury is chaired by Bill Hanway, Executive Vice President, Global Architecture, AECOM. Members of the jury at the A+D event will include: Claire Bonham-Carter, Vice President, Design Planning, AECOM; Stephen Engblom, Senior Vice President, Cities, AECOM; David van der Leer, Executive Director, Van Alen Institute; Bryna Lipper, Vice President, 100 Resilient Cities; and Mimi Zeiger, Co-president, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.
Along with the PennDesign entry, the finalists were a proposal for Bangkok, Thailand, entitled CanalSOS (Michel Liang, Civil Engineering, Berkeley City College; Sunantana Nuanla-or, Master of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University; Pin Udomcharoenchaikit, Master of Environmental Science, University of Aegean, Greece; Jacky Wah, Bachelor of Landscape Architecture, Louisiana State University) and WATERPOWER, a proposal for Quito, Ecuador (Bennett Lambert, PhD Civil and Environmental Engineering, MIT; Elizabeth Reed Yarina, Master of Architecture/ Master of City Planning, MIT).
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