Future Families

The studio this week was focused on creating depth and realism in our future scenario, through the creation of a set of characters in our future vision. These characters would be walked through our future, and we would develop our city vision around them, adding detail to our concept, creating a real city, rather then an undefined conceptual idea. The characters we created were a family, comprised of a husband (William, 32), a wife (Kate, 29) and their young child (Brenda, 3). We felt that this group could allow us to understand more the issues relating to surge in inner city residential developments, cause by a absense of vehicular traffic and the repositioning of commercial and retail businesses to the outside 'wall' of the city. To start with we looked at what this family would need if they were living in the inner city. 
They would need

• workplace access
• general access
• established sense of community
• residential options for various levels of income 
• recreational space
• educational facilities 
• safety'

The first two could be provided through the use of public transport, and Jessica Higson sugested the use of a maglev train. Popular throughout the world for high speed transport, there is currently one low speed maglev train in the world, located in Japan. These trains create minimal noise, little pollution and require little maintenance. More importantly they are also create less noise then traditional trains. The full article on Maglev trains can be found HERE Our group decided that the Maglev would run on a raised track circling the inner city residential areas, running in both directions. The track would between the inner city and the commercial ring surrounding it. This would allow for users to quickly travel between areas in either the residential or commercial areas of the city. We also developed 4 nodes within the inner city to be used as transportation hubs, allowing some access further into the city and creating areas of retail activity. Below is a diagram showing the transportation network developed.

We also looked at the idea of having several small roads allowing vehicular access on the outskirts of the city, to both allow some retail activity in the residential areas and the create a connection between the different areas of the city. This can be seen below. 

To establish a sense of community Ruwan discussed with us the need to provide functions for people to interact, social clubs, community halls, the sort of thing that people come together and interact, rather then just having open parks in which people can ignore each other. This is something that will be very interesting to explore on this city wide scale, and over then next week I will try to explore this. 

The aspects of residential options, recreational space and educational facilities are fairly easy to implement, and all exist to some degree in Brisbane already. The would just need to be upgraded, and more of them implemented. recreational spaces can be from by architecture like Libeskind's condomonium (see other blog entries). Safety can also be introduced to the inner city by providing this sense of community, and by design techniques such as CEPTED, amongst other things.