Stack city

Behrang Behin

Stack City is a speculative project that exploits the future as a domain for experimentation with urban form. It is primarily concerned with the convergence of technology, infrastructure, and urban space in our future, post-oil cities, and seeks to define new, sustainable ways of life that might emerge from this condition. This exploration is carried out by projecting forward the development logics emerging in the new cities of the United Arab Emirates and increasingly prevalent elsewhere. However, the project attempts neither to glorify the conflux of architecture, technology, and branding that occurs within these new cities, nor to rebuke it outright, but to accept it as an underlying reality that must be brought to light for deliberation in the realms of culture and politics by evoking possible futures that may emerge from it.

Stack City combines a solar-driven thermal updraft mechanism with a flexible, livable, and scalable urban fabric to produce a highly efficient infrastructural framework and a novel urban environment. Solar-thermal updraft is commonly employed on the building scale for passive cooling. Its use has also been proposed at larger scale to produce renewable energy (e.g. Jörg Schlaich’s solar chimneys). Stack City employs solar-thermal updraft to both generate energy and moderate the microclimate of the city. The infrastructural zone that supports this also enables the flexible deployment of other technologies, including photovoltaics, a personal rapid transit system, district cooling and dehumidification, and other urban utilities. The resulting super-compact multi-layered urban fabric not only produces its own energy, but also makes possible a new way of life.

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