RECLAIM:SURFACE TRANSFORMING SUBURBAN TO URBAN¬
SUBURBAN: surface/land dedicated to and designed for the car
URBAN : surfaces/land dedicated to and designed for the person
In order to transform a suburban site, the SURFACE which now belongs to the car must be RECLAIMED. Conversion from suburban to urban begins with investigation of the site to determine the existing formative FRAMEWORK, or the patterns that define the context. The investigation determined that in order to effectively transform the competition site, the boundaries must be extended.
The framework is established by:
• the Civic Grid and the Shopping Mall Grid;
• the height of the Shopping Mall establishes an eight-metre height datum that forms the relationships between commercial, open and residential space;
• Transit Patterns and the Pedestrian and Vehicular Hierarchy;
• the relationships bet¬¬¬ween the Site and the Block, the Block and the Neighbourhood and the Neighbourhood and the City.
To RECLAIM SURFACE we create a new grid, established by the existing traffic and shopping mall patterns. The grid supports redevelopment of the existing surface, an empty sea of parking stalls, into a new community. The current heart of the site is the shopping mall. The heart remains in place, and is now converted to a pedestrian friendly open-air merchant district, with pedestrian corridors based on the existing mall corridors.
The new community is organized around the patterns dictated by the heart and will rise out of the reorganization with only two major rules: 1) the Jane Jacobs rule that no less than 150 units per acre be accommodated throughout the entire site; and, 2) the amount of existing open space must be maintained by redeveloping 100% of the reclaimed parking surface into public space within the built form of all future development. This means that as buildings take their place on the former parking surface, the equivalent surface is integrated as public space into each building.
Team Members:
Jeremy Sturgess
James Andalis
Michael Farrar (contact: 403.263.5700)
Dion Lassu
Darren Polanski
Jessie Andjelic
Kevin Harrison
Mike Rempel