One person’s ego-centric vision of how cities should adapt to their own particular individual needs encroaches upon the dreams of another, as revealed by MVRDV’s Tetris-like open-walled ‘(W)Ego House.’ The design is part art installation, part futuristic vision, part warning against architecture that’s one-size-fits-all. Originally created in 2015 and displayed at Dutch Design Week 2017, it’s now reassembled for UABB, the seventh Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture in Shenzhen.

MVRDV worked with The Why Factory, a think tank and research institute associated with the Delft University of Technology, to create the installation, which “represents a window into the future of adaptable housing to the user’s needs. The vision allows the coexistence of multiple lifestyles in an optimized dense reality.”

Dwelling on the concept of coexistence, the architects posit that we all have to learn to negotiate with each other to optimize use of limited urban space. The layout of (W)ego is meant to be adaptable and reconfigurable, though the installation displays it as stacked static rooms.

As far as the architects are concerned, this process of negotiation is a good thing, and W(Ego City) displays a novel way in which various kinds of housing can be Tetrised into a single building taking up a relatively small footprint in a city where undeveloped land is hard to come by. They argue that every dwelling could be unique, each one ergonomic and tailor-made to particular spatial needs. Some people might need an accessible space all on one level toward the bottom floor, others may prefer a more unusual space that requires active climbing, others are happy to pay less for a smaller and simpler unit.

That may be true, but is the firm accidentally making a statement on the impact of class, and how the dreams of the rich impede upon the everyday comfort and survival of those with fewer resources at their disposal? While some might look at (W)Ego City and see a playground where they can choose the customized residence of their heart’s desire, others see a maze of ridiculous spaces that aren’t just unavailable to them, but produce irregular, impractical, virtually unusable ‘leftover’ spaces that would likely rent for lower prices.

MVRDV co-founder Winy Maas says “Through gaming and other tools, (W)ego explores participatory design processes to model the competing desires and egos of each resident in the fairest possible way.”

But when multiple people are ‘negotiating’ with each other to build their own spaces however they want within a limited envelope, and not everyone has the same financial resources, physical strength, entitlement and pushy personalities, who wins?

It’s funny how the idea of a purpose-built, car-free city where everything you need is easily accessible on foot seems so modern, yet it’s actually a return to our roots. To some, banning automobiles from densely populated urban centers is a radical concept, but European cities like Venice and Brussels are giving architects and urban planners fresh inspiration for contemporary equivalents. Here’s a mix of historic car-free places around the world, and pedestrian-only proposals for cities like New York, Los Angeles and Philadelphia that’ll help stop people from getting hit by a car and also help achieve a greener world.

NYC’s Broadway as a Pedestrian-Only Park

One of New York City’s best-known yet least-busy streets could transform into a pedestrian-only park, eliminating cars and trucks and providing green pathways to and from major public spaces like Times Square and Madison Square Park. The difference between converting a section of the city to a park and creating a car-free section is access to all of the businesses and public services residents need on a daily basis, so depending on how it’s handled, this could be a major, positive change to the way the city functions. The proposal, by Perkins Eastman, would also help Manhattan manage its drainage system, allowing water to be absorbed into the soil.

A Prime Pedestrian-Friendly Example: Venice, Italy

Quite simply the greatest pedestrian city in the world, Venice’s very walkable web of streets forbids almost all motor vehicle traffic, with dense buildings clustered around charming promenades and tranquil canals. Home to 70,000 residents and temporarily hosting many thousands more tourists year-round, Venice offers the same modes of transportation now as it did centuries ago, with its 118 small islands connected by over 400 bridges and accessible by boat.

Great City: China’s Car-Free Dream Oasis

Will China’s ‘Great City’ ever become a reality? There’s been no word on this project for a few years, but perhaps this entirely walkable city of 80,000 planned for a rural area outside Chengdu could still someday be built. The development bans motorized vehicles other than a mass transit system, and is organized around a series of high-rise towers surrounded by green public spaces. Walking from the center of the city to the parks takes just ten minutes.

Vision42: A New 42nd Street

Citizens of Manhattan have come together to propose a reimagined and upgraded version of 42nd street in Midtown, adding a low-floor light rail system that travels through a landscaped pedestrian boulevard. Vision42 “welcomes pedestrians with space, greenery, and amenities, combined with speedy and efficient river-to-river travel, via a modern, at-grade, low-floor light rail line” adoptable within four years. The photos are downright utopian – imagine being able to navigate Manhattan on foot without the sound of honking horns and screaming cabbies.

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Car Free Cities 12 Pedestrian Only Places From Venice To Nyc

Many an architect has dreamed up visionary plans for city centers, but few have actually seen their designs come to fruition in a real live urban setting. And while many such unbuilt concepts are technically viable, others are wacky, fanciful or downright bizarre. These 13 vintage urban design ideas for the future, from perfectly symmetrical egalitarian communities to the egotistical demands of a deranged dictator, will probably never become reality – and in many cases, we’re better off that way.

Gillette’s Metropolis

(images via: io9)

Before his name was inextricably connected to safety razors, King Camp Gillette had a utopian vision for the future which revolved around a waterfall-powered tiered city he dubbed ‘Metropolis’. All residents of this imagined city would have access to the same amenities including rooftop gardens in the perfectly round, precisely divided multi-functional buildings in which they would live, work, play and eat. Like many of Gillette’s ideas, the design never went anywhere, but it’s notably similar to many very modern 21st-century concepts for sustainable urban centers.

Broadacre City

(images via: mediaarchitecture.at)

Like Gillette’s Metropolis, Broadacre City was meant to be an urban utopia. But when renowned architect Frank Lloyd Wright imagined the picture-perfect society of tomorrow, he saw not highly compact and efficient high-rises, but sprawling self-sustainable homesteads. Originally conceived in 1932, Broadacre City puts each homeowner in a self-built single-family home on an entire acre of land brimming with gardens. Complete with multiple cars per family, it would almost be an accurate prediction of future suburbia if not for the airplane in every front yard.

Atomurbia

(image via: io9)

If giving each and every family in America an acre of land seems impossible, imagine what life would be like if ‘Atomurbia’ had come to pass. This concept, published in a 1947 issue of Life magazine, detailed how to atomic bomb-proof America by spreading the population across the land in a geometric grid and relocating all industry into underground structures so that any single bomb would do a minimum of damage. The whole plan would have cost a measly 5 trillion dollars in today’s currency, and the authors – atomic scientists from Chicago – thought it could be pulled off within a decade.

Hotel Attraction

(images via: wikimedia commons)

Antoni Gaudi’s architecture defines Barcelona, Spain even today with its fluid curves, reflective surfaces and organic shapes – but it would stick out like a sore thumb in the comparatively staid cityscape of Manhattan. Perhaps that’s what he had in mind for ‘Hotel Attraction’, commissioned in 1908 and also known as the Grand Hotel. The rounded, spaceship-like form would have risen in the exact spot where the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center were later built, but the idea was ultimately abandoned. Gaudi’s unrealized design was actually considered as a possibility for the Ground Zero memorial after the attacks of September 11th, 2001.

Welthauptstadt

(images via: wikimedia commons)

We all know that Adolf Hitler had many an ambitious plan that (thankfully) never came to pass – but few are aware of ‘Welthauptstadt’ (German for ‘World Capital’), the Fuhrer’s design for a new Berlin to be constructed after his expected victory in World War II. Taking elements from other empires around the world, Hitler imagined a broad ‘Avenue of Victory’ down the center as well as his very own ‘Arch of Triumph’. A test structure constructed in 1938 to determine whether Berlin’s marshy ground could have even held up such heavy Romanesque architecture (verdict: nope) still stands today.

Palace of Soviets

(image via: adlhochcreative)

The Palace of Soviets would have been the world’s tallest structure at 100 meters high and crowned with a brightly lit hammer and sickle as a monument to Lenin on the site of the demolished Cathedral of Christ the Savior, if only the Nazis hadn’t invaded in 1941, putting a stop to construction. Its steel frame was disassembled for use in fortifications and bridges, and its foundations served as the world’s largest open-air swimming pool for a while before 1995 when the whole thing was filled in so that the cathedral could be rebuilt.

Ville Contemporaine

(images via: tommatthew)

The architect known as Le Corbusier was an essential figure in the development of what we now know as modern architecture, and his many theoretical urban design projects aimed to make life better for residents of cramped cities. Displeased with the chaos of big cities, Le Corbusier designed ‘Ville Contemporaine’ as an orderly home to three million people where housing, industry and recreation all occupied distinct areas connected by roads that emphasized the use of personal vehicles for transportation.

Seward’s Success

(images via: matthewspencer)

If it was Seward’s Folly to purchase Alaska from the Russian Empire in the first place, perhaps Seward’s Success – a huge climate-controlled, glass-enclosed city for 40,000 people – could have made up for it. Or not. Proposed in 1968 and nixed in 1972, this unbuilt community was dreamed up after the discovery of oil reserves at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska when developers imagined droves of people coming to the area. The crowning jewel of the perpetually 68-degree dome would have been a 20-story Alaskan Petroleum Center, surrounded by housing, offices, retail space and an indoor sports arena.

Triton City

(images via: a place to stand)

If not for a certain tell-tale 1960s aesthetic, Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Triton City’ could easily fit among today’s designs for floating eco-friendly cities. The futurist, architect and inventor was ahead of his time as usual when he imagined this tetrahedronal metropolis for Tokyo Bay, a seastead for up to 6,000 residents. Fuller wrote about the possibility of desalinating and recirculating seawater “in many useful and non-polluting ways” and using materials from obsolete buildings on land, which were hardly popular ideas at the time.

Future New York, “The City of Skyscrapers”

(images via: io9)

By 1925, many of New York City’s skyscrapers were already present, but futurists of the time envisioned not only a great deal more but a sort of aerial civilization complete with elevated train platforms and perhaps a rather unsafe number of aircraft flying around all at once.

New York City’s Dream Airport

(image via: ptak science books)

All the airplanes in that 1925 postcard would definitely require a monumental airport in New York City, and what better location than right smack in midtown Manhattan? This concept  for “New York City’s Dream Airport” featured an astonishingly large – and some say ugly – runway platform. But for all of the prime real estate that this monstrosity would have devoured, it seems as if it could only handle a handful of planes at a time with absolutely zero  margin of error, sending errant planes straight into Central Park or the East River.

Slumless, Smokeless Cities

(image via: bigthink.com)

How do you build a city so egalitarian that slums are eliminated entirely, and nobody ever has to breathe in pollution? Sir Ebenezer Howard, the father of the garden city movement, believed that a careful layout with six satellite garden cities connected via canals to a densely populated central city would do the trick. Thoughtfully, the design included specially designated spaces for “Eplileptic Farms”, “Homes for Waifs”, “Homes for Inebriates” and an insane asylum.

Boozetown

(images via: modern drunkard magazine)

“Just imagine a resort entirely centered on the culture of alcohol. A boozer’s paradise built expressly to facilitate drinking and the good times that naturally follow. Where the bars, clubs and liquor stores never close.” Mel Johnson’s ‘Boozetown’ was an entirely sincere proposal with street names like “Gin Lane” and “Bourbon Boulevard” that would have begun as a resort town in Middle America and eventually expanded into a full-sized adults-only city with permanent housing and its own suburbs. After many obsessed years of struggling for financing, Johnson gave up on his dream in 1960 and died in a mental hospital in 1962.