SufficientCity - Seed for a City

University Of Liechtenstein

Instructor: Prof. Peter Droege DI MAAS CMPIA

Dr. Anis Razdi

Project - Edible City

Status - Academic Project

Location - St. Gallen, Switzerland

Program - Housing, Industrial, Commercial Mix

“Winkeln-Nord” is the most significant industrial/commercial area in terms of its urban development located in the west of the St. Gallen city in Switzerland. The industrial use forms the urban structure by extended, orthogonal production and storage facilities. This growth has not only eaten up the precious agricultural part of the city but also making the environment contaminated. We need to control this unsustainable development and make it into a sustainable one. The transaction of these structure into a new purposeful intervention could lead this part of the city into a new direction. We can already find some traces of this change happening on the site. The incubated commercial activities have already started to make its way into the dominating industrial area. With the insertion of a right program into the site could help to make this dead space into a charged one. That will not only help the residents to reclaim the land from the industries but to generate a sustainable economy and create more jobs.

Taking clues from the Edible Infrastructure and aquaponics systems, I am proposing in response to the architectural and social issues of today and tomorrow. By inserting this concept of the edible city. In which we have to foresee, how the infrastructure will transform itself over forty years. Imagine living in a town which considers food as an integral part of its metabolic infrastructure. By strengthening the design tools, we explore the generative potential of this system to create an urban ecology that provides for its residents via local, multi scaler, distributed food production, reconnects the traditional waste-nutrient cycle and reduce food cost from transportation that runs on fossil fuel. Imagine our future living in the cities where residential buildings have this another skin that produces food and energy for urban citizens in a controlled environment. Imagine state of the art aquaponic systems that can produce food for locals and nearby settlements. Moreover by strategically increasing the number of dwelling units, this site not only will go a long way toward meeting its sustainability objectives, but also will be competitive, resilient, and great places to live.