Cool Reburbia Design Concepts With Major Green Factor!

I just learned something about myself that I never knew before -- apparently, I really dig design and I think that I have Greenwala to thank for this new personal revellation.

When I'm not in front of my work computer actually DOING WORK, I'm...well...sneaking a peek at the latest greatest green goodness that people in the Greenwala community have posted in the Groups and Blogs sections.

One of my favorite groups has become Green Design because I'm endlessly blown away by the originality of artistic minds to redesign objects and structures that reflect our eco-goals.

That is why Dwell Magazine and Inhabitat.com's Reburbia competition made me sit up and take notice.

Basically, they've called on architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers to devise original ways to reinvision the suburbs that embrace car-free mobility, ‘burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation (among other green goodness).

There are just a handful of finalists vying for the $1000 top prize and in my humble opinion, here are few of the most outstanding entries that really promote intriguing green designs:

1) Bumper Crop: Converting Parking Lots to Farms -- Designed By: The Miller Hull Partnership

Bumper Crop is a soil-less farm irrigated with reclaimed waste water and suspended above the strip mall parking lot to shade the ground plane and reverse the heat-island effect. By means of a membrane bioreactor, reclaimed water from the city sewer main supplies the overhead crop with nutrient-rich irrigation water creating an oasis in the asphalt desert. Land currently used for parking only is reclaimed for urban agricultural production thereby preserving undeveloped land and repairing the ecosystems that have been sacrificed for soil-based agriculture.

2) T-Tree: A Towering Community of Sustainable Residences -- Designed By: Adil Azhiyev, Ivan Kudryavtsev (Light+Space)

The basis of the T-trees social housing project is a cubic shaped living module with 3m sides that boasts easy assembly, replacement, or adding extra modules depending of the needs of families. Composed of recycled materials (wood, plastic, glass, aluminium), each prefabricated module will have such common components as furniture, toilets, shower, kitchen etc. Roof mounted windmills will also produce 25% of the required energy needed for each module.

3) Regenerative Suburban Median -- Designed By: Brian Alessi

While I question the safety of this design idea and the increased incidence of wildlife-meets-car accidents, I still appreciate the designer's intent. There is always so much under-utilized space in the middle of roads -- many suburban streets are 35 to 50 feet wide. This new regenerative median for suburban streets treats gray water and sewage, produces agriculture, provides a platform for small scale commercial activity and slows down automobile traffic to promote increased pedestrian activity and social interaction within the neighborhood.

Design of the regenerative median provides a strategy of land use manipulation to create a closed loop system for water, agriculture, and human waste. The localized water treatment system, when tied into existing infrastructure, slowly curbs the neighborhood demand for distant fresh water supplies and the energy required for its transport and treatment. Depending on local conditions the design of a regenerative median could manipulate other elements ultimately inserting open space, residential units, mass transportation, pedestrian circulation, park land, or native habitat.

4) Airbia. A Suburban Airship -- Designed by Alexandros Tsolakis & Irene Shamma

Airbia proposes a new eco-friendly and efficient transportation system linking the suburbs and city centre.  This network would potentially replace the use of cars and trains as transportation between the suburbs and the city centers. Inspired by zeppelin technologies, the proposed airship engages the idea using helium to hover, which is proven to be a sustainable and economical approach. The proposed airship has a capacity to carry 400 people and travel with an avarage of 150 km/h speed on a hight between 30 – 500 meters. Instead of having a major airship station, Airbia proposes a more dispersed network of station-platforms, that constist of staircases, lifts and ticket spaces. This way the system becomes much more flexible, since these drop off – pick up platforms can be placed almost anywhere in the city.

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What do you think? Could any of these ideas really be employed in the real world? What would be the pros and cons of each?