The ubiquitous interlacing of our built environment with smart technologies and digital information networks requires new approaches to their analysis and holds huge potential for its future development. The way we describe and understand human and non-human environments is changing as radically as the tools we use to design them. The necessary methods require a multidisciplinary approach that includes designers, planners, engineers, physicists, chemists, biologists, social scientists, city administrators, citizens as well as disadvantaged, and underrepresented groups. Using design and science, Car Factory Neo-City offers the blueprint to learn more about the cities we inhabit, to make them more sustainable, livable, diverse, and inclusive, and to invest this knowledge in the development of new concepts.

In this sense, this project is the kernel of a new approach to urban development that integrates people, nature, and technology into a multi-layered and networked urban resonance space.

The starting point of the spatial development is Car Factory production facility and data center, which, combined with the aspiration for sustainable energy production from solar power, circular resource management and hydroponics under greenhouse conditions, offers a wide range of interfaces with general quality of life issues, including living and working, food security, learning, and public policy. 

To imbue these interfaces with a powerful lease of life, DMAA´s spatial conception is based on a linear multi-plane developed configuration that can be scaled at any time and articulates itself three-dimensionally through the convergent boundary between two “tectonic plates”. One of the folded plates houses a vertical farm and thus simultaneously serves as a light and dust filter for the office spaces located in the other and connected by a dense network of bridges, spanning their interstices. The proverbial spatial charge density thus expressed is the symbolic impulse that emanates from the architectural landmark, capable of setting future spatial expansions into membranous oscillations.