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Urbanitarium [ Urbanism ], zero dogma [ Think Tank ]

Unit / 

Spatial Forces

The Forest City Project

Ecological Urbanism for the 4th industrial revolution, emerging from Gabon.

Category

June 22, 2021

Date

Area

sqm

Gabon, in Central Africa, is a country rich in forests, rivers and biodiversity. Like all developing countries, their challenge is to decide to follow the principles of industrial cities or to invent an ecological model that attracts talented people and inspires the world. The Forest City Project faces this second option: the challenge of re-inventing how to inhabit the planet, making the fight against climate change a reality following the sustainable development objectives of UN-Habitat.

This will be a forest city that will develop bio-products and will create scientific programs to learn from forests. The city will not follow traditional urban patterns, but natural ones, developing a new type of linear branched city, where neighborhoods are adapted to their environment and merge with it.

Its foundational project will be a lab factory to educate young people in designing and fabricating products with local wood, promoting bio start-ups. These are the foundation elements:

Circular economy. It’s a zero-emissions city that produces its own energy and uses renewable materials. Buildings will be made of local wood, and they will be energy-self-sufficient and will recycle their waters.

Forest: a living factory of renewable materials. Information technologies and nanotechnology open an immense innovation through biomaterials and technological solutions that emerge from nature in a new biocenomy.

The living economy. This project fosters a happy life on the planet.

The Forest City Project includes a Lab Factory, self-sufficient timber buildings, a public market, the urban development of the communities, drone ports, and a mobility study.
It offers new answers to how to create a new generation of cities. Africa will be urbanized in the coming decades, so it offers the opportunity to think about the human habitat, avoiding the mistakes of the cities of the 21st century.

Project Team

This project is in collaboration with Guallart Architects

Guallart Architects
Vicente Guallart, Yang Lei, Honorata Grzesikowska, Firas Safieddine

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