WeTown City for 40000 People by Vicky Chan

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DI: What is the main principle, idea and inspiration behind your design?

VC : We want to find way to combine live, work and play in one area so that people can reduce their reliance on vehicles.

DI: What has been your main focus in designing this work? Especially what did you want to achieve?

VC : Our main focus is balance. The balance of residential area with work and play area, so that it is self sustaining. If one aspect of the design is off, it will defect this whole idea of live work and play within a 8 minute walking distance.

DI: What are your future plans for this award winning design?

VC : We are spending the next 15 years building it in Canada.

DI: How long did it take you to design this particular concept?

VC : It took us about 6 months for the first concept and it is an on going revision in the next 15 years.

DI: Why did you design this particular concept? Was this design commissioned or did you decide to pursuit an inspiration?

VC : It was commissioned but the design, ideas and the concept partly came from us and partly came from the client.

DI: Is your design being produced or used by another company, or do you plan to sell or lease the production rights or do you intent to produce your work yourself?

VC : The client is a developer and they are building the masterplan.

DI: What made you design this particular type of work?

VC : We are architects who believe in green and sustainable living. Small design matters but large design like this can impact even more people.

DI: Where there any other designs and/or designers that helped the influence the design of your work?

VC : We conducted a global survey to see how our design can integrate work, live and play. It is a global collective idea.

DI: Who is the target customer for his design?

VC : Technology company coming from the US and wanting to establish a Tech Center in Canada.

DI: What sets this design apart from other similar or resembling concepts?

VC : We promote a car-less design with a 8 minute walking life cycle. Many city plan still relies on vehicles.

DI: How did you come up with the name for this design? What does it mean?

VC : We have a branding consultant and went through iterations of name selection with the clients. Wetown is to imply a city that is about We the people, and not car or something else.

DI: Which design tools did you use when you were working on this project?

VC : We use many software to analysis design, sun, water, utilities but the main model was done in Rhino.

DI: What is the most unique aspect of your design?

VC : People can walk from live to work to play in 8 minute.

DI: Who did you collaborate with for this design? Did you work with people with technical / specialized skills?

VC : We work with engineers, traffic consultants, economist, urban planners, landscape designers, branding designer, lighting designers and real estate agents.

DI: What is the role of technology in this particular design?

VC : We need accurate calculation of area, resources consumption, phasing and benchmark. BIM helps us to calibrate all these data live.

DI: Is your design influenced by data or analytical research in any way? What kind of research did you conduct for making this design?

VC : We conducted a global survey to see how our design can integrate work, live and play. It is a global collective idea.

DI: What are some of the challenges you faced during the design/realization of your concept?

VC : Time. We will use 15 years to finish this project but many things can happen in this time frame.

DI: How did you decide to submit your design to an international design competition?

VC : For the city and our collaborators. Many people pitched in their ideas during the survey for free. Winning an award is the only responsible solution.

DI: What did you learn or how did you improve yourself during the designing of this work?

VC : We have to trust other consultants on area that we are not expert of. Believing that collaboration will lead to better work.

DI: Any other things you would like to cover that have not been covered in these questions?

VC : Working on large scale project can be vague especially we have to predict the future, but it is very fun to be a futurist. Knowing people will one day live a car-less lives excite us on a daily basis.