Week Three: Urban Tutorial

I have chosen and been allocated to the URBAN tutorial. Our first task was to brainstorm future scenarios involving the scenario: a congestion charge has been placed on the CBD area for all vehicles.

Our ideas covered:

ALTERNATIVE FORMS OF TRANSPORT

• The city becomes a cyclist community with more dedicated bike lanes and bike paths.
• Car parks are reclaimed as greenspace, producing increased biodiversity in cities.
• The creation of internal transport systems e.g. trams, trains.

RECONFIGURATION OF THE CITY CENTRE

• City centre will move to another location nearby, e.g. Chermside, Carindale, Indooroopilly, My Gravatt etc.
• City centre may disperse into multiple 'smaller centres'.
• Job centres and offices will disperse more into suburbs.
• City fringe suburbs will become 'dead zones'.
• There will be a government policy that forces more people to live in the country where each will have their own centre.

BUILDING TYPOLOGY

• Retail will suffer/may cease to exist (as it is the office workers who use their services) and people will not want to travel into city for shopping.
• More people may want to live in the city so they do not have to own cars and can easily walk to work, therefore there will be denser living and more highrises forming).
• DEAD SPACE = What is to happen to the shopping mall (Myer centre) and car parks? 

To get my head around these ideas, our Group's homework was to look at what is actually in our site, so that we could specifically imagine what could happen to these spaces in 50 years time, say? To do this I put together a quick map of what exists within our site:

After drawing inspiration from our site, I was able to expand on a few of our thoughts and ideas that we came up with in this brainstorming exercise:

SUMMARY OF IDEAS

• More people will work from home and shop online due to the tax, and therefore the retail and food outlets will suffer in the CBD.
• Jobs may begin to offer more flexible working hours to avoid tax (e.g. from 2pm - 12pm).
• 'Dead spaces' left behind by retail industry may transform into warehouses for production.
• City will become self- sufficient.
• Office space may transform into residential space.
• People may live in the city and the outer suburbs will be for leisure.
• There will be more frequent, localised, smaller centres that are distributed thoughout the outer suburbs.
• More mid-rises in outer suburbs.
• Pedestrians will dominate the CBD roads (cars will have to give way).
• Peak hours may change, where the tax will only apply during certain hours.