Sustainable Cities (ASU, SOS 111) Vision Building Exercise

Day-dream with me a while:

You step out of your brownstone-esque home, and enter the shady boulevard of your street. It's a narrow road, only big enough for one car to travel through at a time. Tall, willowy trees dapple the wide sidewalk, and provide cover over the equally wide bike-lane, divided by smaller planters full of herbs and other edibles. You grab some leek seeds on your way over the neighborhood community garden, where you'll drop them off in the "seed donation" box, before getting in line for the metro.

The ground beneath the rail lines is covered with moss and hardy native succulents, some just beginning to turn crisp pinks and rusty reds, as they always do this time of year. The shelter roof above the station's platform is also covered with plants, these are taller grasses and pollinator favorite flowers. You can hear the bird song muffled by the draping honeyvines that will soon be cut back.

As you listen, you decide to walk to work instead, it's probably one of the last warm days of the year anyhow, might as well enjoy it. As you exit the station there's a gradual ramp that sweeps up and over the rail lines, so that pedestrians can safely and easily continue on their way without regards to the powerful metro trains. The bridge is constructed with a mesh grid, so that it never floods, and mosses, dwarf hedges and certainly some weeds, grow up and around it's structural edges. One particularly invasive, albeit insanely stubborn, "Tree of Heaven" is growing in the center of the bridge, providing shade and it appears, as you walk by, a nest for some jays.

Leaving the bridge behind you pass libraries, schools, daycares, parks, more community gardens, bike stops and more metro stations until, about 10 minutes later, you arrive in the center of town. A central sculptural fountain that recycles gray water is surrounded by a traditional skyscraper landscape, except that each building has one lower-central floor dedicated to vining, hanging and crawling plants. They look like a giant green sword has sliced through them all. There are no cars allowed in the central hub, so you walk across the square confidently, passing people reading on benches, and planters with beautiful topiaries. You're almost to the "Remote Workers Co-Working Lounge" and can smell the coffee brewing from outside the doors. Inside private and collaborative spaces mix in various honeycomb office patterns, with a coffee shop flanking this entrance, and a shared gym space buffering the back door that opens to the opposite side of the same block. Waving to the admin, Lisa, you get in line for coffee, signaling that you'll grab her something too. You do this every morning you come in, so you already know she want's old fashioned black tea- since she's staff she gets it for free anyway. But you mimic a tea bag going into a hot mug to double check anyway. Because just like the birds above the platform and the seed box a block from your front door, and the jay in the bridge tree and the man reding by the city center fountain, you understand that the only way this kind of Free(dom) works is together.