Resilient Metropoles 

Studio Shajay Bhooshan

Tutors Henry Louth, Keerti Manney

Team Nishtha Gupta, Ashwin Rajendran, Sidharth Tayal

Currently, 8 out of 10 mega cities are on the coast because of trade, tourism, and resources like oil. Resilient Metropoles anticipates that upcoming 2.5 billion of urban population will thrive near the coast because of the benefits of being near the sea. But the inevitable issue of climate change is causing floods and hurricanes affecting 40% of world population directly. Many cities like Venice are investing in barriers, but they are proven to be a short-term solution only. Resilient Metropoles envisions the upcoming cities to be resistant to this primary issue through design. Instead of investing in fighting against floods, water can be used as a resource. 

Studies of economically and socially thriving cities such as London or Amsterdam developed over hundreds of years. This thesis involves a prototypical urban simulation system with rule sets, used to understand the growth of city over time consisting of residential, industrial, commercial and office, which is referred as 4D land use. This allows multiple stakeholders to purchase land and construct buildings along with infrastructure of canals and roads considering realistic scenarios involving time and financial transactions. Resilient Metropoles is a proposal where all the stakeholders can help the city grow collaboratively. This allows stakeholders to produce optimum growth simulation out of many trial and error processes to develop, reducing risks of wrong spatial and economic moves onsite.  

Further on in the design process the simulations were converted to spatial designs, with a catalogue of tiles. Thus, formed city fabric, considers proximity and height of water-levels and the direction of high-speed winds. The tiles include mixed-use buildings and variants of different land uses at distinct locations. Environmental resilience is based on our research of canal and street designs over different prototypical contexts. Findings from this thesis have a potential to become globally applicable model for sustainable growth of coastal cities.