Self-Sufficient City, Indonesia
Role: Project manager & design lead for project completed at WOHA Architects
Status: Competition (2014)
This master planning competition poised a unique challenge- to create 60,000 new public housing dwellings on a 730Ha site currently overgrown with secondary rainforest. Our approach was to design an integrated tropical eco-town in a forest, retaining half of the existing green landscape by creating a new urban-planning paradigm for dense urbanism in the tropics. The design goal was achieved using ‘3D master planning’ consisting of layered strata rather than typical mono-use parcellated planning.
Using a strict height limit to our advantage, the housing blocks are lifted off the ground, providing an expansive canopy for large-scale urban farming and photovoltaics. By elevating the housing, the entire lower strata is liberated for public uses. This approach allows the implementation of macro-scale benefits such as an elevated car-free community terrain integrating an intra-town transport network with pedestrian and cycling paths, retaining over 50% of the existing rainforest to promote biodiversity and for the benefit of residents, generous inter-block spacing around natural forested courtyards, ample shaded tropical community spaces, a recreational reservoir lined with unique commercial development, and a 100% zero energy self-powered town.
Beyond technical considerations, this proposal seeks to demonstrate how the challenges of rapid urbanization can be turned into opportunities for creating a highly liveable and sustainable integrated eco-town that is visionary, vibrant and innovative, yet rooted in place, people-centric and endearing. This new typology for tropical urbanity allows the versatility to create a town that is progressive yet personal; structured in a flexible yet legible manner; possessing a scale and character that is robust yet romantic, one that charms with its imageable car-free townscape of trams, rustic villages and brick kilns (lift cores / hot stack chimneys, referential to the site’s history as a brickworks) and beckons with its vibrant waterfront and scenic preserved existing forested hills. (Text by WOHA Architects)
