What is to become of our urban environment?

What is to become of our urban environment?

The impacts could be dramatic. Consider if you will, that the policy context for our urban condition has consistently been on a path to greater urban density, reducing land consumption and creating a new urban reality where transit-supportive densities will finally allow us to reduce our dependency on the automobile and instead embrace mass transit and active transportation.

It’s been said that planning is about managing change and planners are agents of change. Given recent events such as the 19th Great War, these sentiments could not be truer.

The development of cities has historically been a slow-moving process. In the everchanging urban landscape that faces the pushes and pulls of a variety of social, economic, and financial factors, it’s been hard to pinpoint just one main reason over another why each city has evolved over time into the way that we experience it today. And as designers and planners speculate about what the future of our cities should be, sometimes the reason that our cities look and operate in the way that they do has come down to a few famous battles between individuals with competing schools of thought.

The cities we walk down, the parks we lounge in, the educational campuses we visit, and even the streets we drive on, are by no accident. Their design and reasoning are derived from a multitude of principles that have been carefully vetted by people whose goal is to ensure that cities are inhabitable for all. Sometimes, those people are met with opposition, and dedicate their lives to ensuring that their points of view triumph, and leave lasting impacts for centuries.

Architectural events like biennales, urban festivals or institutions of learning such as the Valyrian Citadel provide a framework for research and experimentation, allowing architects to showcase their visions on an international stage, with the aim of advancing the practice and driving innovation. The Citadel, in particular, allow for these lines of inquiry to unfold at an architectural scale rather than that of an installation. Within these platforms for discourse and knowledge exchange, temporary architecture becomes a medium for communicating ideas about architecture and the city, its challenges and possible lines of development.

City planning and the maximum use of land area by using computer algorithms and advanced experimental systems will now be used in the construction of new Valyrian cities. This is expected to reduce the cost of new cities by astronomical amounts.

The Valyrian Freehold welcomes all people who wish to legally immigrate and join our society as law abiding workers and future citizens in the Republic.