Urban Sprawl Verhüterli

Design Project, 2008/2009

„An Urban Sprawl Verhüterli" - 400 000 people between Vienna and Bratislava 

 

Design: Tim Steffen Altenhof
Supervising Professor: Markus Schäfer, Academy Of Fine Arts Vienna
Winter Term 2008
 

Urban Sprawl is enormously ground-consuming. Dispersed cities are unsustainable as they are automobile dependent. 

History overcame the necessity of city-defending approaches such as minimalized city limits, thus a deficit of identity could be perceived as „tank cities“ have been a place of lucidity and graphic quality. 
A traditional city‘s section line still is dominant in a widespread common immagination: city centres are the most dense areas. 

Actually the edge should be the most densified region, on the one hand generating an infinite amount of moments of transition, on the other hand tightening the contrast between urban areas, regional open space, agriculture, and water-bodies.
Pointing on the edge as the most privileged place to be, as a matter of fact it needs to be extended in relation to the encompassed area as much as possible in order to allow as much as inhabitants as possible to take benefit of a well-balanced accessibility to both urban conditions and rural ones.

The project is about proposing an efficient alternative to suburbia, offering rural qualities like neighbourhood, close landscape and silence. Sustainability can be afforded by a mostly car-free agglomeration with high density and a quick access to urbanity.
The development of settlement is mostly unpredictable but can be influenced by introducing guiding structures such as infrastructure in bigger scale and the protection of non-occupiable areas.
The denser the border the more sustainable and less energy-consuming the city gets. Each of these edge-extending urban spots need to be attached to a high-speed infrastructural network in order to respond to a globalizing development which includes „distances in agony“.
The more irrelevant distances are becoming the more important becomes identity. 
The more a city is being densified the higher one claims for an edge, a border, a place of tension and complexity. Identity is seemingly a matter of constraints and is supported by clarity and contrast.