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ARPENT CITY

Design Team: Jaime Correa

       Mitigation and adaptation will be the two most important strategies for the future of the American city. The Arpent City project proposes a “New Receiver Town” in the State of Louisiana for citizens who have started a process of retreat or migration from the lowlands of coastal areas into safer, and higher, regions of the State. This “self-sufficient” project uses the “Arpent System” of land distribution typical of French settlements in the Gulf of Mexico and Haiti. The composition of the linear “Rags” alternate agricultural areas and urban areas where every dwelling is configured around courtyards for cross-ventilation. Four distinct neighborhoods, distributed by a single type, for ease of rapid construction, add legibility to the plan and contribute to the production of increments of urban development where the concept of a “15-Minute Walk City” is adapted to the general daily life of the residents.

       Each neighborhood encourages a new type of public life where narrow streets and wide public spaces provide opportunities for socialization and the improvement of our human condition. The project should be understood as an abstract analytical reinterpretation of traditional building types and urban forms in the same manner of the strategies used by the Italian Neo-Rationalist movement in the mid-twentieth century. As such, and because of its genealogical ascendance, the project should also be considered as a part of the traditional German rationalist/minimalist movement at the beginning of the twentieth century. As a “New Receiver Town”, for migrants and retreaters from lowland areas, the issue of standardization of buildings is justified because of the necessity for rapid construction in the current emergent moment of climate emergency –that is, a moment when urban development patience is not affordable anymore.

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