Cities can no longer be physically defined, the advancements of digital infrastructure make virtual connectivity just as important as physical connectivity and this has been accelerated throughout the coronavirus pandemic. The current low rise sprawling and colonisation of land within our global cities is unsustainable and relies too heavily on the use of cars. The Intra-Infra City (IIC) is a drastic rethink on how we could organise our cities.
The Intra-Infra City is a proposal for an interconnected system of high-density urban nodes, located on the undesigned spaces within the motorway junctions of the M58. The data-driven approach aims to re-balance dispersion, a quantitative measure of the way in which infrastructure is distributed and dependent upon each other.
The 8 sectors present in the system (leisure, industry, office, services, retail, waste, transport & housing) have been informed by a detailed study of CUBE City by MVRDV (2005), a concept for a self-sustaining mega-structure built for 1 million people. The result was a volume of 38km3. All the nodes within the Intra-Infra City are characterised by the ultimate hybridisation of its sectors, prioritising the availability of green spaces and the ability to adapt to the future needs of its users.
An IIC (Intra-Infra City) Tool has been designed to allow users to define several inputs and decide on the distribution of its sectors that responds directly to its context. In theory, The IIC concept can then be applied anywhere in the world.
