Happening in Newark, NJ; this project is an outcome of an extensive research done on Megacities and Programmed Collapse. After studying what a megacity is – a metropolis or more than one metropolis merged together, a megacity is usually defined by a minimum of ten million inhabitants- and what a collapse is – as utilitarian collapse, threshold value collapse, or complete breakdown – of which was studied to infer what a programmed collapse might be and how can a collapse become a design tool.

Mobility was the case study of this project throughout the preliminary research phase; urban mobility in Newark. What can collapse in an urban environment as a cause of urban mobility? How can the mobility system in the city collapse? How is data affecting how we deal with evolving cities? How is technology shifting the paradigm in the world of cars, roads, networked systems? What is the influence of new sharing platforms on traffic in the city? and finally; How would the future look like?

This project is all the research put into work, in a block-scale intervention to the larger urban context.

DENSITY is the major animator of growth and development of cities, density means more demand, more and more, all the time, in a pace sometimes faster than the growth of the infrastructure.

HOW WE READ THE CITY has a lot to how we experience the city, how we design buildings, economic networks, programme distribution… we’ve been displaying cities as 2D, which influenced our circulation in the city, on a “ground level”. Highrise buildings? they look pretty much as a point in a city plan, you go up and down, no lateral displacement. Trajectories in a city are defined by the programme distribution in a city, this tension between places causes a certain flow of people. It is time to think in 3D about cities, to rethink cities as a complete whole, as one object.

URBAN INTERIORS emerge out of density! Museums, Stations, Markets…All these programmes are becoming  public interior spaces, and with all the sharing platforms emerging – car sharing, desk sharing, room sharing…- to the smallest property. All this happening at simultaneously, is a major indicator that how we perceive architecture, the urban context and public space is certainly changing. This project tends to study all the circulation inside a block, from the city within to understand how people move, and afterward, change some private to public, tweak some spaces, and change the nature of the existing block.