China is the country chosen to present the new self-sufficient, post-Covid city, in Xiong’an New City. This work seeks to define a new standard of urban life, applicable as a raw model around the world. Entitled ‘the self-sufficient city,’ it introduces a new urban model — a hybridization of traditional European-style urban blocks, the contemporary towers of China, and the productive farming landscape. This new urban environment offers a single place to live, work, rest, and produce resources locally while remaining connected globally, thus ensuring a full life even in prolonged periods of confinement.
It’s conceived as an accumulation of layers, defining a range of functional needs for human life at different scales: home, building, and community. Organized in four blocks, the structure will be built using mass timber with passive design solutions. A mixed-use program includes apartments, residences for all generations, offices, a swimming pool, shops, a food market, a kindergarten, an administrative center, and a fire station.
Each building will be covered by greenhouses for the daily harvest of produce, enclosed beneath sloping roofs that collect solar energy. All the apartments will feature a large south-facing terrace, as space for leisure during confinement. Likewise, the units will offer ‘telework’ spaces, creating social networks for sharing and exchanging resources. Along the ground floor, small coworking digital factories, with 3D printers and prototyping machines, will design and fabricate small objects for daily use. Overall the project will comprise an internal metabolic system, integrating energy and food production, recycled water, and material reuse to promote a distributed model for urban management.