Do you remember the day? On April 13th, 2015, a group of Czech citizens had this crazy idea to proclaim a new state, the Republic of Liberland. Since then, several thousand people have applied for citizenship of this micro-nation, located on a piece of land of 7 square kilometers between Croatia and Serbia.
The ‘craze’ doesn’t stop here – there might be a new and even better reason why you too may want to live in Liberland.
A proposal for an algae-powered city has won the design competition for this new small country. Liberland definitely presents a unique challenge for architects and urbanists alike, tasked with designing a self-governing micro-nation that guarantees its citizens economic and more so, personal freedom.
RAW-NYC now tackled that challenge with a deep green mixed-use city design that stacks horizontal layers vertically to accommodate population expansion.
This proposal for a new kind of architecture is a pretty pedestrian-friendly design and supports a growing populace with stackable horizontal structures. This technique allows the construction of a city-state in consecutive temporal layers to form a self-sufficient, compact, dense, integrated and resilient urban fabric. Algae, strains of which don’t require significant sunlight to proliferate, would be grown on the underside of buildings to provide a clean source of energy like it has been proposed in many other areas.
The goal is to design a unique environment that is conducive to innovation, ensuring that all of its citizens have ample opportunity to reach their full potential. The RAW-NYC team is led by Raya Ani, who had a lot to say about Liberlands new approach on what a city should be like:
“The main vision was to balance density with quality of life. We wanted to address density differently than defaulting to skyscrapers, where connections between buildings occur only on the ground level. We wanted the city to be built one horizontal layer at a time, where it’s possible to walk everywhere and everything is connected. The horizontal layers are stacked in a staggered configuration to ensure natural light penetrates all of them.”
Now it’s up to Liberland president Vít Jedlička and his team determining whether a stackable algae-powered city design is feasible for Liberland or not. He added:
“We are blessed to have such great minds involved in creating Liberland. The winning design concepts show that the country can become a prosperous habitable area using [the] latest innovations in green technology to remain mostly self-sufficient. We will further study upon the 1st place project to see if and how exactly it could be introduced in reality. When that’s possible, we want to launch a virtual 3D landscape with building models to help people choose a place to live or to invest in. I congratulate all selected participants for their clever ideas representing the freedom Liberland stands for.”
Sustainability played an important role in the RAW-NYC design. It’s not just algae, but buildings featuring integrated photovoltaic panels, rainwater harvesting systems, and green roofs. Nothing would ever go to waste – neither space nor materials. Everything in the city would be recycled and could then be converted into biofuel.
Like Liberland itself, this design competition provided the opportunity of a lifetime – designing from scratch what a progressive nation-state might look like.
Now let’s hope that all people involved have the tenacity to bring all of this to life and it (uncharted spoiler alert) doesn’t end up like Libertalia in Naughty Dogs latest installment of Uncharted though. 😉
*Article originally appeared at Minds: https://www.minds.com/blog/view/662658346079232009
