Chuncheong New City

SOUTH KOREA, 2005

This project is informed by the idea of the ecological footprint. The concept is simple: cities are the creatures of territories that far exceed their own boundaries. By thinking of cities as artifacts defined by purely political borders, the real nature of urban sustainability and exchange is distorted and obscured.This proposal is for a city that takes dramatic account of both its needs and effects and dedicates itself to the project of radically reducing its own footprint. This, we believe, is vital to the health of a planet that simply doesn't have the resources or the surface to sustain a population consuming at typical developed-world rates. We suggest that the new city works to secure "neutrality" in eight critical areas: energy, air, food, waste, water, temperature, employment, movement, and habitat. By this we simply mean that the city must strive either to produce or process each of these life-sustaining elements.

We recognize that this paradigm of self-sufficiency is a goal never to be reached: the vital interconnection between cities, regions, and nations is not to be denied nor is the economics of comparative advantage. But the self-sufficient city is also replete with functional, economic, and environmental efficiencies and we propose that Chungcheong New City become a living laboratory for the invention and implementation of the panoply of best practices that must ultimately inform the character of every city.

Credits: Michael Sorkin, Makoto Okazaki, Mitchell Joachim, Britta Degn, Noura Al Sayeh