URB_713 Metropolitan Design Elements Studio: ‘Cool Futures: The Mega Non-City in the MID’

The future of urbanism as a state of being—being urban—is increasingly concentrated in a limited number of global megacities. They are the future planetary habitats of humans as they metamorphize into an urban species—Homo urbanis—and the urbanocene is fully realized [Urbanized % = Pc [city population] / Pt [total population]. 

Megacities are also centers of global innovation, creativity, productivity, consumption, wealth creation, inequity, poverty, and resource use. Each megacity competes for resources and is more connected to a planetary system of production and exchange than its immediate spatiality. Their metabolism is increasingly interdependent, with specialized global regions of production and supply, implying a new morphological form and process for urbanization: the Non-City.

Students in this studio investigated one of North America’s MID megacities: the Great Lakes megacity, a binational urban area anchored by Chicago and Toronto integrating over 30 other cities. Projected to grow to over 70 million people and have one of the largest economies in the world, this megacity is supported by an abundance of natural resources. The Great Lakes accounts for 20 percent of the global and 80 percent of the national fresh water supply. The region also has access to significant operational landscapes for energy, food, production materials, and other resources necessary for the megacity’s continued growth. It is also projected to have a cool future as one of the most climatically livable areas in 2100, although the effects of climate change in this area are still subject to considerable uncertainty. Considering all of these factors, students redesigned the lakefront with a focus on the implications of climate change projected over the next 50 years.