Creating Sustainable Futures for Southwestern Cities: The ProtoCity Approach in the Ciudad Juarez, Mexico/El Paso, Texas Metroplex - Design with the Desert: Conservation and Sustainable Development - page 533

31
Creating Sustainable Futures for Southwestern
Cities: The ProtoCity™ Approach in the Ciudad
Juarez, M exico/El Paso, Texas Metroplex
Pliny Fisk III
CONTENTS
31.1 Introduction ........................................................................................................................ 535
31.2 Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems ........................................................ 536
31.3 Lessons Learned ................................................................................................................ 538
31.4 Development Ladder ......................................................................................................... 540
31.5 Development of the ProtoCity ......................................................................................... 542
31.5.1 ProtoScope .............................................................................................................. 542
31.5.1.1 Phase 1: Information Gathering ............................................................ 543
31.5.1.2 Phase 2: Assessment/Learning ............................................................. 543
31.5.1.3 Phase 3: Implementation ........................................................................ 543
31.5.2 Solution Sets............................................................................................................ 559
31.6 Planning the Juarez El Paso Metroplex .......................................................................... 561
31.7 Conclusion .......................................................................................................................... 564
Acknowledgments ...................................................................................................................... 568
References ..................................................................................................................................... 569
The role of art is to make the commonplace special and that of science to make the spe-
cial commonplace. 1
31.1 Introduction
My professional experience with cities began in 1971 when I worked for Ian McHarg's
office as the coordinator of engineering and ecology for New Orleans East, a new town
of 100,000 on the Mississippi Delta. My role was to develop a system to filter the town's
organic waste and waste from barges on the Mississippi River through a constructed
wetland that in turn provided feed to the largest fishery in North America. A secondary
mission was to support the establishment of industrial conversion processes that ren-
dered the other parts of the waste flow into productive industries for the new town. This
metabolic redesign was to set up economic development scenarios to divert toxic waste
coming down the Mississippi away from the vulnerable Gulf of Mexico ecosystem by
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