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Mekano Envisions Vertical Sprawl Powered by Cairo’s Garbage City

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Mekano Architects have come up with an intriguing idea for growing a city. This is stackable modular housing that can be piled up as needed.

Rather than building a city so that it sprawls out from the center: spreading out further horizontally as more people move to the area – this design can do the same thing, but vertically.

Now it will become an ecological housing development, with rainwater harvesting and greenery growing on all the terraces.

The housing it would replace is pretty wretched, it was literally a garbage city. 

Originally it was a very traditional garbage collection/natural recycling center, and pigs were allowed to roam free through the old streets and they ate the food waste that formed a lot of the garbage.

That ended with the swine flu scare. So now it is where all of Cairo’s garbage goes, and now it is full of fermenting garbage, emitting methane – just like any landfill containing any rotting food does. Mekano’s design was to address and solve this problem.

Methane has its uses, however. It can be harvested for making energy to supply electricity to the new city growing above. Methane is essentially natural gas, the same kind that turns on when you light your stove – it can be burnt. And burning the gas under a housing complex could heat water to turn turbines to make electricity, and the hot water could be used in a heat exchange system to provide the city dwellers above with hot water for heating and washing.

So what are the poles for? Well, when cities spread out horizontally, the pipes carrying water and electricity and cable are under the ground, so you don’t see them. Here they are going vertical, in order to be able to keep stacking new housing on top, the service connections are ready to be hooked up to new housing as it gets added.

(Supposedly the poles will also harvest wind energy from teeny tiny propellers on top (the most inefficient possible turbine design) but that is not something to be engineered by an architectural firm, even a visionary one!)

Other than that, what a workable and radical concept.

Via Green Prophet