“Emerald Web” Sudbury 2050 urban center masterplan (Sudbury, Canada, 2020)
Since the eighties, Sudbury has made great strides to diversify its economy and remediate its surrounding environment–earning international recognition for its efforts. By 2050 the reclamation of Vale’s mining site could be well underway. Our proposal is a stepping stone between the newly recovered lands to the east and the Minnow lake conservation area to the west. We propose the recovery of Junction creek connecting the former extraction sites to the southwest to New Sudbury’s conservation area in the northeast through a riparian corridor.
The regional metabolism includes soil (tailings and biosolids), water (sewage, mineral polluted streams, watershed runoffs), vegetation (managed timber production and reforestation efforts), mineral (nickel and copper, but also platinum and palladium) and atmospheric exchanges (acid rain, noxious gasses, and mining emissions). In space, Sudbury can’t be understood without a cross section of the entire biosphere from the crust to the stratosphere, and, in time, from the Paleoproterozoic era 1.8 billion years ago and well into the Anthropocene, tens of thousands of years from now.
Inspired by the Living Building Challenge, our proposal aspires to exemplify “a city as beautiful as a forest.” The basic concept of the proposal is to merge the vacant and underutilized lands surrounding the train yards and Brady street. A star shaped structure with a minimal footprint bridges these gaps. The result is a continuous synthetic surface of 60 hectares extending from Lorne street to the west to Paris street to the east, and from Elm street to the north to Riverside drive and the train yards to the south. This surface contains three green “petals” or parks, each one leaning toward a specific program informed by its urban surroundings.
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