What is interesting about the project?

Urban sprawl is taking over our land by growing uncontrollably; what surprises me is that it is nothing new, it is a problem that we have been facing for years and have not been able to control.  We all make part of the problem and it seems that we are not be aware of it. We leave in houses outside of the city were we go to every day after work, school or any other activity we might perform within the city. Every day we drive long distances commuting from our homes to perform our daily routines. We stop at the gas station once or multiple times a week to fill out our car tank to keep our lives going. At the end of the day we complain about the traffic congestion, gas prices going up and things like that; but what we do not see and complain about is us being the reason for these problems

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What is interesting about the project is that it analyses the performance of the society and the dependencies that we have in order to access resources. Transportation is a big issue that we face as we move out of the city into the suburbs. Urban sprawl is uncontrollably moving outwards, every time disconnecting us more and more from the center where we can achieve all our needs. Now families need multiple cars to perform their daily activities because they commute to work and it is necessary for every individual to have their own means of transportation due to the inefficient location of the places we live in. More cars on the streets, more streets needed to accommodate the excessive number of vehicles transiting, more fuel demand to keep us moving. It is all a chain that from one things leads to another and it never stops.

It is interesting to learn how we are negatively impacting our environment with our poor choices; in this case poor choices as we design new “communities”. We as designers should start designing in response to these problems; counteracting urban sprawl and starting to condense our communities to make them more self-dependent. Creating communities that directly connected to our existing urban environments instead of separating them from them. We need communities where we do not have to depend on a vehicle to go to work, to school or to the store; we need to strive to create communities where we can depend on our own means to perform activities as such. I think it would be interesting to learn what it takes or if it is even possible to create a community that is self-dependent.

It is interesting that we are aware of the problem that we are facing, but we seem to not care about it or simply ignore it. The construction of homes and the designing of new suburban neighborhoods continues every day. It is time to start changing our ideals regarding the way we live. Why can’t we adapt to live closer to each other? Why can’t we learn to live more sustainably? Why do we have to move out of the city if we end up going back?