If Only… an ‘Autonomous Wildwood’ could wake us from our Tarmac nightmare
Ivana Stanisic, Duncan Thomas and Nigel Bidwell of JTP re-imagine the hard, anonymous and polluted urban motorways of London
London’s urban motorways, heralded with such optimism in Abercrombie’s Greater London Plan of 1943, are now much-maligned, failed experiments of a lost era. These soulless places typify the drudgery of the daily queue into the metropolis and the evening escape and are the forgotten environments of the capital; the A to B places tolerated on the promise of future arrival at a better destination.
The ‘Autonomous Wildwood’ reimagines these hard, anonymous and polluted spaces with a variety of self-driving vegetated vehicles creating verdant, lush and biodiverse corridors on demand. The eclectic mix of planted, meandering mobiles reject the modernist motorway aesthetic, appearing low tech but combining and rearranging to create beautiful and evolving landscapes that feed and support groups of nomadic insects and vertebrates. Georeferenced, the green procession accesses road-monitoring air pollution data and redirects; chasing pollution and carbon dioxide around the arterials of our city.
JTP
Ivana Stanisic, Duncan Thomas and Nigel Bidwell are architects at JTP, an award-winning international placemaking practice of architects and masterplanners.
From studios in London and Edinburgh, JTP undertakes placemaking projects at every scale, from cities and towns, to neighbourhoods, streets and individual buildings; creating new places and breathing life into old ones.
