The challenge is to get a dense and vibrant urban space, without interrupting the existing natural conditions, but including them in a continuous exchange with the built environment. To get to this goal, nature and town have to grow together in a strong relationship as two interconnected ecosystems.

A town as a network

We considered a town composed by more nodes closely interconnected among them. Each node is part of a network that constitutes the whole town and the way the single nodes are connected one another lets nature flow throw the system, making a balanced void/full system at this scale.

The shape of the nodes

Each node can host up to 2000 people, this reduced scale allowing to deal with the need for a self-sufficient urban unit on different scales. Each node measures about 250 m, the maximal distance inside a pole is 500 m, 5 minutes on foot. This distance determines the diffuse presence of the basic services. The needs for heating can be satisfied, at the scale of a node, by a small CHP plant.

Like in the old towns, where the “shape” of the districts depended on the need for water and on the access to the market, in this project the dimensions of the nodes are similarly determined by the needs, in terms of energy, of “urban life” and easy pedestrian access to services. The single nodes are crossed by a large boulevard which is the backbone of the transportation system.

Energy

The issue of ecological efficiency is taken as a key point for the process of designing the town and it influences the orientations at each level. A holistic approach helps conceiving a strategy that takes into account a whole range of multiple processes, parameters and actors influencing one another.

The two systems (urban/landscape) are in a continuous interdependency:

- Agriculture areas produce biomass which generates energy for heating. The agricultural production of the areas nearby can be partially sold in the urban markets and consumed by the town population;

- Forests are O2 producers. Regenerative forests closed to the town provide building materials, cutting the costs of transportation, while wood waste is used as fuel (pellet) to get energy through the CHPs;

- Landscape is seen as an infrastructure.

This new model of town is seen as a synthesis between the needs of contemporary citizen to be in contact to a lively environment close to work and leisure opportunities, which is usually intended to be in a city, and a more relaxed and independent way of living, closed to nature and “related” to open spaces.

Flexible, evolutive

The density mixity (co-presence and distribution of multiple functions) is an important indicator taken into account: it is usually a characteristic of city centres and it disappears in mono-functional suburban areas. Here it informs each sector of the city and it is usually obtained as an hybridization of the residential types.

The new Henna and its territory

Our proposal for an innovative town is extremely adaptable to a large variety of possible existing conditions, so that the landscape has to be shaped only in minimal part, in order to fit the new implantation. We took the special existing features of the Henna site: infrastructure, topography, presence of forests and agriculture etc. and included them in the planning from the beginning. The site specific features and identity will not be erased but will be enlighten by their new relationship.

The margins of the single nodes follow the agricultural limits, the existing topographic features and, like platforms overlooking the sea, they become territories from where one can be confronted to the landscape’s beauty and complexity. The linear parks run through the districts like canals, but they are also infrastructures: going across them, one can reach different points of town, while always staying in an natural though urban ambience.

Henna identity : ecology is not a label

The idea is to promote a town which is self sufficient, ecological and energetically efficient, while not associating it to the cliché of the “eco-city” and its nowadays ubiquitous “aesthetics”. Here, a small ecological footprint is obtained by restoring a close contact and exchange with the surrounding territory, optimizing the town shape to the mobility issues, the energy production and saving and using up to date technologies to re-interpret the archetypical relationship town/nature. We have chosen not to expose the contemporary high tech tools as a flag that would only help to get a easy, (and easily obsolescent), “ecological image”, for a fast acknowledgement.

Overcoming of the old town/landscape dichotomy

The domestic ambiances, the everyday space that connote a town, here meets a territory that has become no longer familiar for contemporary urban inhabitants. The ambiguous geographies of a land to discover are merged with the urban fabric, creating stripes of lands through the buildings.

These spaces, where the built environment is therefore suspended, are constitutive parts of the town: this territory becomes a strong part of the urban unit, not its opposition. While the town gets a territorial dimension, the territory assumes an urban character. The two subjects establish different layers of relationships through a strategic presence of mixed uses in both of them and the definition of new, lighter infrastructures.

A new way of living in a town

Henna will get the richness of a big city, where there are always new areas to explore and events to be surprised from, with the advantages of a smaller scale town, where work and opportunities are close and a sense of community characterizes the urban life.

The district of Stromso in Drammen lies on the south side of the Drammen river, on a stripe of land surrounded by a rich and beautiful landscape, between high mountains and close to a fjord. Despite its exceptional location and potential the whole area is nowadays a gray and, at a first look, anonymous suburb that lacks urban intensity, open spaces, gathering places and which appears completely detached from its close natural context.

The project provides a new identity to the area while generating a continuous though highly differentiated urban scenario and letting the district interact with the surrounding landscape.

The strong east-west configuration of the Stromso territory is underlined by the insertion of a linear waterfront and by the consolidation of the court-like blocks which appear today to be uncompleted or unreadable.

A sequence of shortcuts, north-south walkways and bike paths is introduced to improve the porosity of the site allowing to easily reach each point of the city.

The central railway station becomes a bridge-building that works as a visual and physical connection on different levels: as a urban telescope it frames the mountains on both sides of the river, it serves as a gate for pedestrians and cyclist to reach the other bank, creates a direct access from the square in front, to the the rails, to the waterfront. At the same time it is a covered gateway for the city, a collective space, an infrastructure node and concentrates inside multiple activities: commercial premises, exposition areas, cafes, small equipments and so on.

The station is one of the three «urban condensers», collective buildings working as energy capturers and producers as well as meeting point. Those interior public gateways are inhabited through all the seasons.

Connecting those three main buildings is a sequence of spaces characterized by many different natures: a central open square, the island and hills park, which extends into the sea, the linear park in front of the station, for pedestrians, cyclists and electric bus, (the district main green infrastructure), the waterfront, with open air pools and sport fields integrated.

Philadelphia is nowadays the metropolis of the United States with the largest number of empty areas, derived from the demolition of abandoned buildings. The phenomenon originated and expanded in parallel with the industrial crisis of the 50s and the city today has to deal with vast abandoned areas, in deep decay, laying close to the city center.

To reinsert these derelict spaces in a living-cycle, a strategy has been developed on multiple scales: the gaps, currently scattered chaotically in the rigid grid of the blocks, are converted into an interconnected system related with the existing city.

From lost spaces, the urban voids become areas of strategical (ecological) rethinking of the urban infrastructure system, they give shape to a green network connected to the existing city parks.

At the local level, single voids, together with the new paths that intercept them, are translated into a continuous system of collective open spaces. In order to provide sufficient intensity of public use to the new hierarchy of streets, parks, yards, etc, the strategy involves their hybridization with elements derived from the world of sport, art and urban agriculture.

The new buildings typologies give a different shape to the block organization and introduce mixity and visual variety in the districts.