Europe & Central Asia » Iran
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Ahvaz, between Uruk and the Parai-Daiza, Gilgamesh and Utnapishtim |
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| The Epic of Gilgamesh, the first ever epic, represented the confrontation of the city and the countryside. The submission of the countryside (Enkidu) to the city (Gilgamesh). Both become friends and complement each other. Wishful thinking… That has not been the case for the 3.000 years since it was written. The city has exploited the rural as the outsider to be under its control. Metro-Matrix presents for the first time a dialogue among both, possible at the metropolitan scale where rural and urban have to be integrated for the sake of trendy sustainability and climate change. The definition of Uruk in the final lines of the Epic represents the metropolitan digit unit of the Metro-Matrix: The BUD.
In the other hand, Ahvaz is at the edge of the submerged Eden of the Torah and the Bible. With the Ice Age, sea level was 100 meters lower and the Paradise (Parai-Daiza in old Avestan: “Royal Walled Garden”) described junction of the 4 rivers is now under the Persian Gulf. Ahvaz is the closest city to that location, and the Ahvaz river, the Gihon, (Karun) is one of the four rivers of Paradise. Adam and Eve drunk from its waters. With this inheritance, one of the most important ones in the world, Ahvaz must be to the challenge of the metropolitan age. It has to succeed to show the path, as it has done, with Uruk, for 6.000 years of urbanization history. The Metro-Matrix is the instrument for it. |
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Kish, Gilgamesh's bow spearhead |
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| Strategic Land-use with mix-uses:
- Airport City: from the terminals to the city parallel to the flight path - Flight path: Low height, non-residential - Business: in the main axis of the city in the way to the airport - Residential: south extension parallel to the coastline. - Residential and Trade: West extension parallel to the coast ant the secondary city Nobonyad - Manufacturing: Between trade and airport. - Tourism: Facing south - Tourism business: Between the city and the provision areas, an extension of the airport city |
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Mashhad Metro-Matrix Mental Map M5 |
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| Download the file | |
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Isfahan acupuncture chart. |
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| Isfahan is in an explosive mood since 1976. Decisions of construction and expansion of an urban Metrorail system, and the ‘New Towns’ approach for peripheral residential settlements have to be combined in a consistent metropolitan policy.
Isfahan Valley has a clear directionality marked and reinforced by the watershed system. The historical ‘satellite’ towns suggest an underlying reticular pattern that has to be enhanced and used for metropolitan structuring. The outcome is simple, sound and consistent. Up to the academic environment to assume and promote it, and the administrative authorities to implement it. |
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Inter-scalar Tehran: From Pairi-Daêza to World Metropolis |
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| Azad University and Milano Politecnico come together to discuss about the future of Tehran as a world city. Challenges are huge.
Urban population is going to grow from 7.7 to 12.5 million people. The Metropolis even larger. Actual housing stock has to grow from 2.03 million to 5.7 million. That is 90.000 per year until 2021, and 72.000 per year later up to 2050. This would require 1 sqkm of serviced land every year if we want to achieve densities of 90 dwellings per hectare, that is 30.000 inhabitants per sqkm. Where to allocate 90.000 dwellings every year for the next 40 years? If we do not want the car to take over Mass Public Transport has to be the answer. From actual 3 million cars, at a ratio of 4 cars every 10 inhabitants, we might expect to reach developed countries ratio of 7 out of 10. That will mean 9 million cars for a 12.5 million population. The cars will grow three-fold. A TOD (Transit Oriented Development) approach has to be put in place. 18 possible locations have to be analyzed, designed and implemented. 5,000 housing units each per year. Tehran has a long past of intelligent urban planning. From the Persian reticular Paradise (Pairi-Daêza) to the most modern multipolar urban reticula Tehran has influenced architecture and planning from India to Spain. Why not built from this invaluable Iranian world heritage? The Metropolitan Metro-Matrix comes along as the natural development of the Iranian DNA. The Acupuncture Chart becomes the element to select strategic locations where action has to be undertaken to achieve a sound and equilibrated structure for the metropolis, capable to address adequately the quantitative challenges pointed out. |
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Ahvaz, Heritage without Legacy |
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| Ahvaz, one of the Iranian largest cities, is located on South Western of Iran near Iraq border and the Persian Gulf. Varied geography, natural resources and relations, allowed human dwelling by building a civic and social life. However, today’s Ahvaz has, unlike its origin and nature, turned into a critical situation. The research provides a proposal in one of the Ahvaz metropolitan centralities, to transform its critical status to a new one based on its original identity. It states natural, social and cultural issues by descriptive methodology and defines proposal accordingly.
With the achievement of the bigness scale, theorized by Rem Koolhaas in the ’90s, we passed the paradigm of the sustainability of the finite urban form, and the question that emerges is related to the definition of new metabolic sustainability that might be able to constitute the model for the urban growth. It may allow us to consider the urban growth phenomena through critical thresholds and paradigmatic transformations, which removes and replaces incorporating parts by selection, pre-existing structures which now are not able to support the new scale and complexity of the contemporary city, leading to decay and abandonment. Metabolism related to a metropolis means the urban system re-configuration by maintenance, substitution and transformation, and it is fundamental to understand the incremental goal of a metropolitan work according to the relations between cultural, energetic and productive investments. The problem of how the old part of the city, the new and neglected ones are integrated as a whole is emerging. It is necessary, to think about a new language of composition, which refuses direct references to a pseudo –picturesque historicism. Thus, the public realm requires the construction of narration, through our architecture, that is able to tell stories about who we are and what a city wants to be. |
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Tehran Metropolitan Proposal |
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| Tehran is a fast growing metropolis. World Bank Data shows a 2.80 annual growth rate. Growth produced in spite a difficult economic and international situation. Future growth might be expected to be higher.
The City needs a Metropolitan vision to be able to address the sprawl risk. The invasion of high quality of the agricultural land of the valley under the pressures of development can be the result. A Metropolitan Plan needs to be designed and implemented. A Plan that will protect environmental valuable land and locate development in accessible and mass transit well served urban land. |
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Tehran Metropolitan Site Urban Design Guide |
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| Scales have to be related from 1:50, Architecture, to 1:50 million, the world.
When we deal with metropolitan and urban planning the most important scales to articulate are 1:50.000 (Metropolitan), 1:5.000 (Urban) and 1:500 (Urban design). The way to articulate them is to establish a mechanism of interrelation that defines the aspects derived from the other scale that some scale has to address. To do so we have the Design Guide mechanism. Design Guides establish the requirements of the Metropolitan scale upon the specific Site when the latter is relevant to metropolitan issues. Such is the Metropolitan Site Design Guide (MSDG). - The MSDG defines the elements the Urban Design project has to address, the requirements, the 'Program' for the project established by the relevant Authority. Sometimes as a suggestion, other times as strong statements. - The MSDG defines the requirements the site has to respond to and solve adequately. The quality of the result (and thus the evaluation in an Academic exercise) will depend on the way the final Design Proposal responds to one and each of those requirements. It will show the professional expertise of the Urban Design. This document shows the case of Tehran Main Metropolitan node: the place where the urban and metropolitan structures articulate. There is an extreme relevance of Metropolitan functions to be carried out in this site. In this site is where the future functioning of the whole metropolitan structure is at stake, requiring a highly qualified response. If this site does not reach standards the future of Tehran will be affected, and as part of the role of the Capital plays in the National economy Iran will be affected as well. Such is the responsibility of the professionals involved. |
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