Tehran 2050 abstract
Cities all over the planet have sprawled into open forms as generalized urbanization became synonymous with globalization. An urbanization that is based on Modernist’s ideologies of a functional city dividing the uses into four major sections: work, play, live and circulation. The functional city omitted systematically natural elements such as topography and water ways leaving today degenerated open spaces and a polluted environment. Furthermore the fragmentation of uses has created a dispersed and dislocated urban form exceeding the human scale and therefore obliterating communities and inevitability culture. There is an urgent need to define an alternative model that will embrace the complexity of the city and also integrate the shift in paradigm in the relationship between man and nature. The new model for the recycling of existing cities will have to place nature at the centre of its strategy in such a way as to generate spaces for human habitability that contribute to the environmental, economic and social sustainability of the planet
Tehran the biggest city between Istanbul and Mumbai expanded according to a masterplan designed in the 1960‘s by Los Angeles architect Victor Gruen one of the instigator’s of suburbia. Before its modern expansion Tehran like all other cities in the desert in Iran was dependent on its adjacent mountain through the quanat system to source itself with water. The quanat is an ancient underground irrigation network that taps into ground water at the foothill of the mountain using the natural topographic slope to direct water to distances that can reach eighty kilometers. Ground water being richest in the bed of a river, Tehran evolved naturally in the axis of the Darband river flowing in a north south axis and becoming the spinal cord for its development. But Victor Gruen’s modernist vision obliterated the geographic context of the city and erased the relationship between the city the mountain and water leaving behind an extremely vulnerable environmental state in crisis today.
Suggesting that cities must be redesigned based on a new urban model taking root in nature, Tehran is used as a prototype to envision a strategic plan for a sprawling city to reconcile with its natural context all the while addressing the social and economic concerns of its population. This project will propose to rethink the city through the irrigation of five urban corridors which borrow the traces of the old rivers and cross the site from the mountains to the desert. Working with BSG, the team commissioned for the masterplan of the capital in 2005 and through a detailed analysis of these waterways and their relationship to the urban and ecological context, the project demonstrates the process through which the strategy of the corridors enables interventions at multiple scales varying from the city to neighborhoods and individual buildings, reviving the quanat as an active infrastructure, depolluting the environment, offering new and original public spaces, stitching fragmented open spaces and building on existing resources for economic development. This project argues that cities need to be revised in their entity through a new type of masterplan overlapping formal and informal planning and using a holistic process combining the disciplines of planning, geography, landscape and architecture as a powerful method to remediate the current urban condition.
Tehran the biggest city between Istanbul and Mumbai expanded according to a masterplan designed in the 1960‘s by Los Angeles architect Victor Gruen one of the instigator’s of suburbia. Before its modern expansion Tehran like all other cities in the desert in Iran was dependent on its adjacent mountain through the quanat system to source itself with water. The quanat is an ancient underground irrigation network that taps into ground water at the foothill of the mountain using the natural topographic slope to direct water to distances that can reach eighty kilometers. Ground water being richest in the bed of a river, Tehran evolved naturally in the axis of the Darband river flowing in a north south axis and becoming the spinal cord for its development. But Victor Gruen’s modernist vision obliterated the geographic context of the city and erased the relationship between the city the mountain and water leaving behind an extremely vulnerable environmental state in crisis today.
Suggesting that cities must be redesigned based on a new urban model taking root in nature, Tehran is used as a prototype to envision a strategic plan for a sprawling city to reconcile with its natural context all the while addressing the social and economic concerns of its population. This project will propose to rethink the city through the irrigation of five urban corridors which borrow the traces of the old rivers and cross the site from the mountains to the desert. Working with BSG, the team commissioned for the masterplan of the capital in 2005 and through a detailed analysis of these waterways and their relationship to the urban and ecological context, the project demonstrates the process through which the strategy of the corridors enables interventions at multiple scales varying from the city to neighborhoods and individual buildings, reviving the quanat as an active infrastructure, depolluting the environment, offering new and original public spaces, stitching fragmented open spaces and building on existing resources for economic development. This project argues that cities need to be revised in their entity through a new type of masterplan overlapping formal and informal planning and using a holistic process combining the disciplines of planning, geography, landscape and architecture as a powerful method to remediate the current urban condition.
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