300 X 300 MM STEEL SQUARE PIPE
The Zero City is a basic strategy for low cost and down-to-earth urban zero ground living - cave man style!
The citizens of Obihiro town in Hokkaido, Japan were complaining that their city is boring. We were invited to run a workshop for the city planners and town architects. We told them to bring their children with them to a gym.
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The basic Zero City platforms:
In the gym we told the children that now you are the
1. Concrete Cave Man Platform Concrete frame 6 floors high shelve-like platform for standard 3 metres wide, 3 high and 5,3 long living units with a fire stove. Bottom floor for general activities including sauna, laundry, workshops and storage for fire wood. Roof top garden recycling composted organic waste. Toilets on the garden deck
ing street. Sometimes they made spontaneous villages or streets Ă? church gossiping with the grocery store. Obihiro Walking Street Workshop by Casagrande & Rintala Demeter 2002 Obihiro, Hokkaido, Japan
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-tion Center is a strategy of recycling industrial buildings and ships out of duty and abandoned commercial and residential buildings for alternative Tolstoyan communities for the modern man in his urban crisis.
city, plumbing and internet. 5. Fermentation Cemetery The last stop for the urban ecologist. Mechanical Biological Composting units for fermenting biological waste including human bodies. When you throw a man into the MBC -unit (Mechanical Biological Cleaning Unit) he gets composted, or actually fermented totally in two weeks. The unit is hermetically sealed so the whole process is anaerobic and computer controlled - so that the fermenting conditions for the anaerobic bacterias are perfect - the moist level, the heat and the pressure. From a 100 kg man you get 30 kg of top soil, the best. The rest is mostly water - biologically cleaned fresh water. The process also produces gases that can be collected into a gas conditioning plant that then feeds the electrical gene-rator. 25 % of the electr-icity produced is enough to keep the whole process ongoing. The rest you can sell back to the city.
The PURC provides the necessary dicipline in order to achieve the Tolstoyan extacy of clean community living. "Without his uniforms man is just a common ape."
The living units can be warmed with, and food cooked on, the personal fire stove by burning waste wood collected to the Zero City -units. The individual caveÂŤs front facade is completely open. Privacy level and room temperature can be controlled with a welding courtain hanging on the opening. On top of the open concrete frame facade is attached a net like layer of concrete reinforcing bars protecting the inhabitants from falling and securing privacy.
3. Instant Village Ad-hoc urban structures recycling sea containers out of use. Fire place attached to the containers that can be piled for high rise stuctures. Construction site scaffoldings providing the necessary storage, gardening and movement infrastructure. Community containers for washing, laundry, compost, sauna and workshop activities.
The Concrete Cave Man Platfrom provides the basic needs for a more archaic way of sustainable urban living.
4. Plug-in Sophisto Hive Steel made scaffolding as a vertical building platform for self made housing units. The scaffolding offers plug-ins for electri-
2. Post Urban Rehabilitation Center The Post Urban Rehabilita-
TOILET
architects and your mothers and fathers are just labourforce. You will tell them how to do a good house and they will do exactly as they are told. The only criteria was that the child could fit into the card board house. In the end we took the children in their houses to the streets of Obihiro as a walk-
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