hUNDRED MILE CITY
Build a street based, linear city a hundred miles long, 200 metres wide and 4 storeys high. Wrap it round London.
Give it little factories, schools, houses and shops laid out in terraces along intimately scaled streets and around squares. Make it a dense, intense edge to London, a confident purposeful boundary fronting a revitalised productive countryside.
Hundred Mile City is a linear Barceloneta, a circular Rome, a stretched Porto.
Surburbia reprogrammed, hybridized, compressed. Catalytic urbanism en flique.
Ride the Hundred Mile high speed orbital monorail, souped up sky fly Circle Line – the loose ends and frayed edges of London’s transport system, its isolated city edge train and bus termini instantly, meaningfully, usefully connected with circus ride technology ( Bexley to Brentford in 40 minutes) super-functional, super fast and super fun.
And, in time, watch our city grow inwards, spreading like a wildfire through wasteful, anti-social, car choked suburbia. Eastwards from Richmond, west across the Newham Marshes, up from Eltham, across the hills of Greenwich and the empty green swards and golf courses of Enfield.
Metroland consolidated, back filled, integrated and urbanised.
London for 40 million people A kind of inside-out plan Voisin…Ville Radieuse – Blighty style.
This project has been supported by the RIBA Research fund, receiving a grant to assist its completion.