Urban Thaw: Encouraging Human Connection within a Winter City

Abstract

What makes urban life possible is human interaction. Without it, cities would not thrive. It has become increasingly easier for residents of cities to stay indoors and neglect the environment and people around them. In smaller cities in the north, this becomes more prominent with less population, and even more prominent during winter when the weather is less than ideal.

In this urban design project, I will be focusing on multi-family housing, gathering space, and outdoor winter activity. The area I have chosen to explore this typology and topic is Grand Forks, North Dakota, specifically the downtown area. This area is well known to me, as I grew up in a small town near it.

The emphasis of this design project is creating a better built environment for winter living. This will encourage residents, new and existing, to interact with the people and neighborhood around them. This will achieve the goals set forth for this project. These goals are to encourage vibrancy through human interaction with the environment and each other, increase comfort through materiality and building orientation that responds to climate, encourage pedestrian and outdoor winter activity through street design and urban planning, and that the choices made within my specific site can be transferred to other small winter cities.

This project is appropriate because urban areas worldwide are growing at enormous rates, and will keep growing. The standard of living of peoples within urban areas should be a focus of designers in today’s world. Since human interaction is the basis of these areas, it should also be a focus. This project will be a cumulation of my design knowledge, with an emphasis on my ability to view design in a larger, more contextual scale. It will also show my basic knowledge of other design professions, urban design and landscape architecture, and my ability to incorporate these into the overall design. The designs themselves will focus on sustainable winter features, materiality, building form, and human scale.

My research methodology will include descriptive and modeling research looking at case studies and building forms that work well in winter environments.