Green Daily

Will Atlanta be shrouded in piedmont forests in 100 years? It will if the winners of the History Channel's 'City of the Future' Design and Engineering Challenge have anything to say about it. Each team was given 7 days to prepare and 3 hours to build a model for how their city should evolve over the next century. The winning design, "City in a Forest" by EDAW, combines re-forestation, a compact population density, and natural water purification -- basically, it's a green-built utopia.


The biggest question for the design team was what to do about the city's water situation -- and that's where they did their most innovative thinking. Atlanta's water infrastructure is notoriously inadequate, prompting the city to set aside $3.9B to overhaul its underground water system in order to deal with floods, and more recently droughts. Instead of throwing money at the problem, the EDAW team proposed that Atlanta should work toward restoring natural watersheds -- allowing nature to do it's thing.

Atlanta's other big challenge is how to deal with its traffic problem and massive suburban sprawl. To address that problem, EDAW proposed a build up of housing along train lines, which would concentrate housing in transit, while allowing piedmont forests to re-emerge in the space once occupied by sprawl. In turn, that would again help streams and creeks re-emerge and take care of drainage.

Hopefully, Atlanta will resemble EDAW's model one day, but there's one nagging question that I can't shake out of my head: what do they plan to do with all of those suburban developments? Maybe they should leave some room in their budget for those suburb-eating robots. That'll take care of those strip-malls.

[via Treehugger]