The People's Fuel: N.U.E.C.

Andrew Lyon and Roy Griffith

The Functionality believes in future planning. As architects, futurists and urbanists our imaginations are often wildly optomistic. New technologies from bio-diesel, to ethenol, to electric cars cloud our view of what the future of transportation could be with pie-in-the sky results. In this project we propose an alternative future, one where the city of Shanghai, in order to sustain its  double digit growth rate, reconfigures the urban fabric to grow its own fuel.

This project designs an economic condition; interfacing between the global demand for energy and the local regional conditions. Developing on the history of western urban productivity, namely Ebenzer Howard's Garden city, The Functionality proposes a gardening city; a city where the parks and landscape promote a vibrant, if destructive, ecology shrowded in the language of economic environmental opportunity. The architectural intent is one of letting market forces play out, argueing that the masterplan is the anti-hero, and that what a citie needs is a strategy not a plan.

Locality is a simple form of optimizing large ecologies. Rather than importing and inputing from somewhere else, ecologies use what is at-hand as an immediate resource. This project proposes not just the input, ethanol, but the new ecology that its adoption creates. It looks at the measure and severity of its impact on the city and its impact on the immediate communities. Adopting such a drastic measure would quickly create an economy that feeds itself, what Alvin Toffler describes as a “Prosumer” society, a feedback loop of producers and consumers support the fuel created and develop a future market.