Sociopolis: Project for a City of the Future

These designs for a "low speed," "rurban," neighborhood in Valencia, Spain, created by 13 international architecture firms (Toyo Ito, MVRDV, FOA, Fran ois Roche and others) under the direction of Vicente Guallart, look again at public housing as a site for architectural utopianism. Each contributor was asked to bring an agricultural sensibility to the high-density project, and to use as a guide the inhabited orchards and gardens that had once anchored local communities. The results include both open meadows and Toyo Ito's stacked lawns, a parking structure of vegetation. While these plans and drawings were gathered in time for the Valencia Biennial and shown there, hey are not just art; the community plans to build them and thus to influence development elsewhere.