Vertal HEX : Mobility for the future vertical cityscape

Abstract

The project originated with the question "What is the future of urban mobility?" and the counterquestion "What is the future of urbanity?". To understand the future of mobility, we first need to try to understand more of the future context where it'll reside. Mobility and the context it exists within are two symbiotic yet constantly evolving elements. This project seeks to speculate about their respective state in the year of 2050. Our global population keeps on growing, and more people are moving into urbanized regions. Already today more 90% of the worlds population is concentrated on roughly 10% of our planets land surface, and the density keeps increasing. To cope with the expanding population, cities need to keep growing and create sustainable infrastructure. The trend in densely populated regions has been to grow in the vertical axis. Besides just residential spaces, modern cities are starting to distribute shops, utilities and other typical city content vertically as well. City blocks and their content that used to be spread out in the horizontal plane are now increasingly being housed within compact hubs over multiple levels vertically. This project proposes the idea of a prototype sub-city within a mega city in the South East Asian region, around the year of 2050. Created as a way to prototype solutions to challenges found in hyper densely populated regions ranging from urban planning and congestion to general liveability. The fictional district has a highly vertically oriented cityscape, consisting of many interconnected highrises and megastructures. Traversing the walls of the buildings, vertically and horizontally, are vehicles propelled through magnetic levitation technology on an inductive infrastructure retrofitted onto or built into the buildings in the region. The far future, visionary setting of the project intends to provoke thoughts and reflection about an urban lifestyle within a far more vertically oriented environment. The thesis also aims to paint a picture of a car free city hub where vehicles are bound to the vertical plane, and the horizontal plane is devoted to the community of the city. Whether it's on the ground level or multiple stories up in a luscious "sky garden", the horizontal planes belong to the people and are roamed by foot. The process behind the development of the project involved research into the future setting and emerging technologies. Creative development and ideation were done using analogue as well as digital sketching, brainstorm sessions and physical and digital mockuping. The final vizualisations and compositions were designed from storyboards describing typical use cases of the vehicle. After researching topics of future cityscapes, creating the future premise of the project and ideating and refining various ideas, the end result of the thesis is Vertal Hex. A maglev propelled shuttle targetting future businesses. Travelling along the walls of the interconnected megastructures making up the future cityscape and company campuses, it allows it's passengers to reach their destinations anywhere within the hub entering right at the floor of their destination.

Original document

The different versions of the original document can be found in:

• http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-172025