Theory and Practice: Guadalajara - Part II

Many of the ideas for the ArpaFIL competition are several years old. If I were to explain their origins as a narrative, I would probably tell a story about how I was driving through West Virginia on a trip home to Chicago. West Virginia is one of the best drives I've taken; the constant undulations of the road along the X, Y, and Z axes makes for an engaging trip, all the while a panoramic of tree-covered mountains inhabits the background. During a particularly long ascent I began to think about how I was in hour 2 of a 14 hour drive, and that I would much prefer taking a train (as origin stories go, this one goes even further back, to a midnight train ride through the Swiss Alps which I found particularly fascinating). I began designing in my mind a method of creating a high-speed rail line that would occupy the grassy median of the highway. Of course it would have to be elevated, so a sleepy driver would not plow his car or truck into an oncoming train. And the space below could be used to carry cable, fiber optics, power, etc. If given a bit more room, this space could carry slower-moving freight trains. Or regional trains. It was the genesis of the circulation spine.

The spine itself was one concept. It provided a solution to the issue of mobility infrastructure that could be applied to other ideas about land usage which I had studied in Christopher Alexander's A Pattern Language. 
A Pattern addressing towns (#3, City Country Fingers) allows for a region of high density to be placed in close proximity to natural and agricultural, zero-density regions. Flying in the face of modern American suburbanization, this system creates a greater area of intact ecology and exposes the greatest number of citizens to its benefits, without putting either ecology at risk. Alexander's book has had a greater effect on my thinking than I realized; While pattern 3 was my primary tool for organizing large tracts of land in the New Guadalajara, I had inadvertently also applied #2 (The Distribution of towns) to my mobility infrastructure network, and #'s 4 and 6 to the lower-density regions. Going back through A Pattern Language, I see that still many more patterns exist in part or in whole, throughout my design.

What has driven the circulation spine as an organizing element has been a desire to reduce the dependency on motorized traffic. Having lived in towns from 30,000 to 3,000,000, I have really always been able to minimize the amount of driving that was necessary. While I have driven a car since I was 16, in High School I was able to ride my bike to school. In Milwaukee and Charlottesville I could easily walk to classes. In Milwaukee and Chicago I have been able to take public transportation to most of my destinations. In fact, many of the businesses I choose to frequent are chosen in no small part because of their proximity to an El stop or a bus. This is crucial in my observations of the urban landscape; Having fewer cars on the roads means less parking, which means more pedestrians, which means more intimate shops with windows, which makes the streets safer, which means more pedestrians, which brings in more business, which makes the neighborhood thrive, which reduces crime, which brings more pedestrians and more income, which improves the quality of life and air and sound and all the things that make cities wonderful. On the other hand, more cars means more parking, means greater distances between stores, means inward-focused stores, means fewer eyes on the street, means greater crime, means fewer pedestrians, means more cars. Both are self-fulfilling prophecies. America is currently caught in a downward vehicular spiral. My interest is in seeing what it would be to have an upward, pedestrian cycle.
By combining a pedestrian-focused urban landscape with an organizational circulation spine, the city begins to take shape. Pedestrian streets run perpendicular to local rail stops at 400 foot intervals, equivalent to half of every El stop. Pedestrian streets run about 1500 feet at their longest, which allows even the farthest buildings to be walkable to a train. By staying within this 3000-foot corridor, there is not a single inhabitant of the city that cannot reach a train with a 10 minutes' walk.
Corresponding to this layout, a pattern of density emerges which is highest at a point where pedestrian routes meet the circulation spine. Akin to a major intersection in a city, these points receive high traffic counts in relation to the far ends of a street. The natural response to to place a greater number of people and businesses near these intersections. Fully 50% of the citizens of the New Guadalajara will live or work within 500 feet of a train station.

The shape of the city has changed. From the centralized shape of a traditional Roman town or Medieval castle town, or the center-less sprawl of an American frontier town, the city has taken on a linear shape, with bulges occurring at cities along the serpentine spine. The shape is without precedent, but the precedents required for city-building have changed. Cities no longer require an elevated position for defensive purposes. Access to a river is no longer needed for water, which is pumped from aquifers; or shipping, as shipments are now made by rail, truck, or plane. The only regulating factor in developing the New Guadalajara was the preservation of natural features. The spine runs along the bases of mountains. Agricultural land is pushed out of the way of forests and riparian corridors. Even the city yields to the right-of-way of streams and natural foothills. The city is subservient to nature, and will adjust itself to suit the landscape. A very un-American concept.

From the omnipresent regulation of the circulation spine comes a new interpretation of wayfinding hierarchy. Whereas the modern highway system organizes itself as a datum, off of which one can find rest stops, towns, or other concrete ribbons, the circulation spine of the New Guadalajara is imagined as an enfilade of public spaces, set in an hierarchical organization. Arriving to the region from a distant location (to Guadalajara from, say, Los Angeles) one would have to transfer from this fastest mode of transportation to a regional train to the city of your destination. From that regional train another transfer to a local train, which makes stops at each perpendicular pedestrian street along the way. Each of these transfer points becomes a hub of public activity, and varies in its size and density from top to bottom.
Even on the street, one must pass through an enfilade of plazas, starting with a central plaza (the largest would be below the regional rail hub) and moving outward, getting progressively smaller, until the outermost plaza may be a small, intimate garden. Moving from one to another  acts as a wayfinding device, while also bringing life and activity to the surrounding buildings.
Once at your destination building, one must again traverse the enfilade of public spaces embedded within the building. Somewhat akin to a sky lobby, this may be a small outdoor garden, it may be an enclosed foyer, or it may be a large plaza set within the building. A traveler will make their way up to the appropriate lobby, and will then move on a set of local stairs or elevator to to appropriate floor. The sky gardens provide a sense of community and security in a building of enormous scale and density.

A few simple concepts combine to create a complex urban landscape of density and hierarchy. The concepts themselves allow for a large city which reduces vehicular traffic and pollution, provides renewable energy to its citizens, allows for a quality of life and community rarely seen today, and can even be self-sustaining, given the amount of quality agricultural land available to feed its citizenry. The New Guadalajara has been a significant exercise in creating a city of considerable size and density while maintaining an environmental and social quality of life.

 

 

My greatest criticism of my own project may be its lack of understanding of Guadalajaran culture, or Mexico's urban process. Many of the elements and proposals I utilize stem from a criticism of American urbanism and some problems may be confined to America. On the surface I understand that this project may not reflect the social, cultural, and urban needs of Guadalajara, but at the same time I never expected them to be. This project always was supposed to be a vehicle for the ideas and concepts I had already created but never applied in any disciplined manner. Even if the project was not meant to tackle Mexican urabnism, I would have appreciated a greater understanding and application. That may be my main criticism, and I'll spend more time on that criticism next time. This competition was a first step of many in understanding a relationship that could exist between architecture and urbanism. It deserves my honest assessments.