The Appalachian landscape is littered by thousands of unreclaimed strip mining sites in need of remediation. For a rural region of rugged natural beauty and abundant but exploited natural resources, this project presents a new form of sustainable urbanization that offers:

- a solution to environmental problems

- a vehicle for wasteland reclamation

- a way of life that operates within a community’s fair earth share

- a place that is removed from the Global Unsustainability Equation

- a replicable sustainability model for the region

- a model of urbanization that eliminates the need for coal and for the mining of coal

- an innovative out-of-season heat storage system that uses the degraded
Appalachian landscape to advantage

- a new design method that emphasizes stakeholder participation

A summary of the proposal:

The CSC Design Studio’s entry presents an urban model, a civil process, and a technically assisted design method by which a community of local stakeholders together with a team of architects and technicians can develop a sustainable urbanism that heals these strip mining wounds and reclaims the Appalachian landscape. (see attached images) Inspired by hilltowns around the world, we have developed not a town on a hill, but a Town-as-a-Hill concept–a compact pedestrian town that places those functions that in the modern town can be a blight on the visual and social landscape, below the new ground surface of a constructed hill. All large scale commercial, institutional and industrial facilities, most service functions, parking, and other activities and infrastructure that create often unsafe dead zones in a conventional town are located within the hill. The “upper town” is supported by the Coupled Pan Space Frame (CPSF) an innovative, economical, cast-in-place concrete structural system developed at the University of Kentucky that is capable of large two-way spans that create the space of the inner hill and house the service systems needed for the upper town. In this way, contour strip mining benches and mountain-top removal sites are reclaimed with a constructed hilltown with green rooftops that recreate the original vegetated pre-mining landscape.

The Sustainable Town-as-a-Hill is composed of a network of level streets, crossed by sloped streets that wind their way to the top of the hill. In addition there is a switchback swath of sloped paths cutting through a network of stairs that climbs the hill more directly, but always at a gently walkable slope. Like its historic predecessors, the town generates a rich diversity of public spaces; from narrow lanes to grand piazzas and from commercial streets to these monumental stairs to public amphitheatres – all supportive of a rich civic life. There is also a sloped elevator on the eastern side of the town that accesses each level and several elevators as well, that connect the inner hill with the levels above. Such a walkable town would typically be too small to contain the necessary variety and diversity of services, while maintaining the human scale essential for convivial living, but the vertical layering of different functions in the Town-as-a-Hill combines the complexity and dynamism of a small city with the intimacy of a human-scaled town. The Sustainable Town-as-a-Hill also makes more land available for agriculture and recreation while facilitating the reclamation of land back to wild nature, which is valued for its unique ability to balance greenhouse emissions.

Wind energy will be demonstrated and sewage will be transported through an oil-based system to power a biogas digestion system, which will also use agricultural and animal wastes. Electricity will be provided principally by large arrays of PV collectors that will cover, stabilize and encapsulate the sloping, potentially toxic valleyfills that had resulted from the bulldozed overburden from the contour mining operations. Heating will be provided through a unique out-of-season hot air collection and storage system. Large, inexpensive hot air solar collectors as low-to-the-ground tension structures will be installed below the town. In the summer, hot air heated by the sun will rise from these collectors and be directed to auger holes in the “highwalls” left over from mining operations. This year-round heat collection will form a large heat bubble within the mountain and will be distributed, also as a hot air thermosiphon, to heat the entire town during the winter as well as to provide for its hot water needs. Whitesburg, the nearby town in the valley below, is the home of Appalshop, the pioneering organization that has produced numerous award winning documentary films and fostered all the arts and crafts of the region. This new sustainable town can be seen in part as building upon this local tradition of good works to create the first town that is ecologically, socially and economically sustainable. Moreover, the entry is to be seen as a new urban model for the redevelopment and sustainable reclamation of the Appalachian landscape.

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