Each year, the Philadelphia Center for Architecture hosts a design competition for student teams from schools all over the country. The idea is to take a certain concept — for the previous two years, the focus was on transportation corridors — and see how these budding architects would apply it to areas of Philly if time and resources permitted. Nothing gets built in the end, but some of the more imaginative ideas could go into local planners’ arsenals for the future.
This time around, the Ed Bacon Student Design Competition (so named for the legendary Philadelphia planning chief) centered on driverless cars. Much as Jonathan Geeting asked in this week’s Forefront story, the Center for Architecture wanted to know what this nascent autonomous technology could mean for the urban form.
At stake, Geeting writes, is “the chance to dramatically reshape the relationship between public space and the car.” To that, the Center adds, “What will Philadelphia look like in this future? How will roadways, sidewalks, intersections, signage, traffic signals, and the relationship between buildings, roadways, pedestrians, cyclists, and vehicles change?”
Five teams won the contest. Four of them decided to take on the Philadelphia Navy Yard, a 1,200-acre swath at the southern tip of South Philly where the city expects massive amounts of mixed-use development to happen in the near future. Another winning team set its sights on Callowhill, a formerly industrial neighborhood just north of Center City and known among planning types for the Reading Viaduct.
See a selection of their renderings in the slideshow below:
Gallery: Driverless Philadelphia
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With a reduction in on-street parking, this team imagines more space devoted to public parks and dense urban buildings.
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With smaller roads, barren parking and driving zones are reinvigorated with green space and wider sidewalks.
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A monolithic, almost dystopian, grid of building blocks dominates this vision of our autonomous future.
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Who says autonomous vehicles have to stay on the ground? This proposal imagines a network for flying autonomous cars.
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By reducing the amount of land reserved for parking, previously underdeveloped neighborhoods near the city center now have the space to grow into dense, walkable communities.
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The first place team proposes specialized “drop blocks” in the core of the city at which all vehicles would unload their passengers in order to ease congestion.
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Driverless cars may not only save on parking space but also allow for cars to safely travel at faster speeds in downtown areas than they can today.
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This plan proposes using the as-yet largely undeveloped Navy Yard as a test-bed for working through these issues before rolling the technology out on a broader scale.
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Connection nodes along a transit loop allow for efficient travel along the entire system without slowing down other travellers.
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Here, we see how driverless car systems will collaborate with subway and monorail systems to connect people with their destinations.
The winning teams represent Cornell University, the University of Texas at Arlington and Philly’s own University of Pennsylvania. They will be honored, along with former Philadelphia mayor Ed Rendell, at an awards ceremony on Tuesday.
Disclosure: Next City Executive Director Diana Lind is the outgoing chair of the Ed Bacon Foundation committee at the Center for Architecture.
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