People mobility has dramatically increased in the 20th century, more than ever before.
On a global scale, the distance covered by one individual in one day has soared from 5 km in the early 20th century to 18 km today. The democratization of the automobile is highly accountable for this result while 45% of daily distance is covered by car. That represents nearly 8 km per day per person. This boom goes along with a huge demographical change as the world population has skyrocketed. In the early 19th, the world population reached the first billion. In the last 200 years this figures has soared to 7 billion and it seems that it is not over yet. Considering population and mobility evolutions, we cover now 30 times more distances than 200 years ago. This fast moving attitude is not only related to the city scale, as people is more and more concentrating in tall monolithic skyscraper reaching hundreds of floors at a glance. Elevators, escalators, ropeways are dominating our environment as we need to be conscious of the innovations in the field in order to smartly design our habitats, avoid congestion and reach self-sufficiency.

This research aims to collect and report innovations and smart solutions in the field of mobility. The structure follows a scheme that goes from the biggest scale, the city, to the human scale, the building, with an intermediate step in the city’s block. Starting with a brief introduction on the history of mobility, we analyse the issues of modern city and the dependency from automobile that shapes our relation with our environment, finally suggesting possible solutions. New attitudes to cities are proposed and alternative transportation systems are investigated, while moving to the smallest scale of the building in which vertical transportation devices control our moving possibilities.

Mobility toward the Self-Sufficient Building is a project of IaaC, Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia developed at Master in City and Technology, in 2016 by:

Student: Iacopo Neri

Faculty: Vicente Guallart, Eulalia Moran