- Poro-City
- April 2024
- Decoding Density Competition – Entrant
- Stephanie Coleridge, Catherine He, Anne Lissett
PROPOSAL SUMMARY
Cities are hard places. Hard buildings, hard streets, hard sidewalks, hard plazas. It is not hard to imagine why for so many Canadians, a single-family home in a quiet, lush suburban neighbourhood remains their aspiration for living, even as it becomes further and further out of financial reach for the majority of young people.
As single-family home neighbourhoods densify to meet the demand of a rapidly growing population, we could lose the features many find so appealing about them: the human scale, the neighbourly connections, the connection to nature in the garden, the space for hobbies in the garage or yard, the sense of private space away from the public realm of the street. We could lose environmental advantages like the native soils where rainfall can inflitrate and which help preserve biodiversity, the habitat for animals, birds, and insects, and the cooling effect of plants and trees.
In Poro-city, we envision a new kind of urbanism, one fully adapted to Vancouver’s rainy marine climate. We envision an urban form that transforms the conventional single family home into a multifamily courtyard building that brings together key elements of each typology, creating a concept that retains a sense of permeability in relation to the street, while integrating verdant permeable rain gardens for infltration and habitat retention.